As if health-minded consumers weren’t under enough stress with recent New Year’s Resolution season, new research published in Frontiers of Public Health suggest around 76 percent of the world’s population (including athletes) are “overfat.”
While the obesity epidemic has grown considerably over the last three to four decades, this study casts light on the much higher numbers of people who may have unhealthy levels of body fat.
While we in sports & fitness assume our athletes and ambassadors, even employees, may have an advantage over the rest, this research says we’re dead wrong. This “overfat” condition is being touted as a “new pandemic that has quietly overtaken the world, and may affect an astonishing 5.5 billion people, many of them athletes.”
“The overfat pandemic has not spared those who exercise or even compete in sports,” said lead author of the study Dr. Philip Maffetone, who collaborated with research assistant Ivan Rivera, and Professor Paul B. Laursen, adjunct at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.
The new study, published January 3, 2017, describes the condition as having sufficient excess body fat to impair health. In addition to most of those who are overweight and obese, others falling into the overfat category include normal-weight people with increased abdominal fat, and those with a condition called “normal-weight metabolic obesity” — with those who exercise regularly falling into one or more of these categories.
Also applicable to athletes, the study estimated 9 to 10 percent of the world population may be underfat. While we think of the condition of underfat as being due to starvation, the number of people starving worldwide is actually rapidly dropping. However, an aging population, an increase in chronic disease, and a rising number of excessive exercisers — those with anorexia athletica — are adding to the number of non-starving underfat individuals. Having too little body fat can also impair health.
This leaves as little as 14 percent of the world’s general population with normal body-fat percentages, according the the study.
The study also suggests this new terminology should replace the old “overweight” and “obese.”
We’re wondering: will the health and fitness industry catch on to the term?
