World Obesity Day: Better Systems for Healthier Lives
It is about time. The world is waking up to the realization that rising global obesity is not a problem of personal failures. Rather, it is the product of systems with the unintended effect of promoting obesity while denying people care for this chronic disease. At the heart of World Obesity Day 2025 is the realization that we need better systems for healthier lives. We need health systems that offer care for people living with obesity. Just as urgently, we need social, environmental, and food systems that will promote rather than harm metabolic health.
A new paper in Lancet today makes plain the need for better systems to promote health in an age of rising global obesity. Summing up the findings of her paper, lead author Emmanuela Gakidou says:
“The unprecedented global epidemic of overweight and obesity is a profound tragedy and a monumental social failure.”
Unmistakable Global Trends
Their analysis of global data on overweight and obesity yields a clear picture of these systemic failures:
“No country to date has successfully curbed the rising rates of adult overweight and obesity. Without immediate and effective intervention, overweight and obesity will continue to increase globally. Particularly in Asia and Africa, driven by growing populations, the number of individuals with overweight and obesity is forecast to rise substantially. These regions will face a considerable increase in obesity-related disease burden.”
Yes, we need better systems for healthier lives.
Turning a Corner in the U.S.?
In the midst of this recognition of a global problem, Sarah Bramblette, Senior Advocacy Manager for the OAC, has spent years confronting bias with U.S. policymakers that obesity is nothing more than a bad lifestyle choice.
She tells us she sees reasons to believe we are turning a corner in the U.S. She finds hope as she listens to the policy conversation about improving coverage for obesity in health systems like Medicare:
“I have many reasons to be optimistic about the possibility of beginning the coverage. I will say personally, as a patient watching those hearings, it is refreshing. I’m hearing people in power say things like ‘obesity is a disease … patients need coverage … patients deserve coverage’ was refreshing. Because after a decade of work, it seems like the message is finally getting through to the people who need to hear it.”
We share her optimism. Increasingly, outside the bubble of experts and advocates who devote themselves to understanding obesity, we see policymakers and health professionals starting to recognize the complex, chronic disease that obesity is.
With care for the people living with it and curiosity about its true drivers, we will indeed turn the corner on the global rise of obesity.
Click here for the new study of global obesity trends, here, here, and here for further perspective. For more on our reasons for hope in the U.S., click here.
World Obesity Day 2025, graphic theme by the World Obesity Federation
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March 4, 2025
