Researchers point to an increase in the share of obese French people, an increase that particularly affects 18-24 year olds.
The proportion of obese French people has continued to increase in recent years, with a particularly marked increase among the youngest adults, detailed on Monday researchers conducting a landmark study on the subject. Obesity is experiencing “a sharp increase in the youngest age groups”, summarized Annick Fontbonne, epidemiologist at Inserm, during a press conference.
According to its results, nearly half of French people – 47% – are obese or overweight. Among them, a sixth of the French (17%) would be obese, that is to say at a level of weight considered unhealthy as opposed to simply being overweight.
The study was conducted on the proportion of obese or overweight adults in France in 2020 and was carried out by survey of around 10,000 people representative of the population.
18-24 year olds particularly affected
This study is a reference on the subject of obesity and overweight in France, because it has been carried out regularly since the end of the 1990s. It is therefore interesting for evaluating the evolution of obesity and overweight. However, if the latter tends to stabilize or even decrease for a decade, obesity continues to affect more and more French people.
These results were already widely known, since they had been made public last year by the League against Obesity, an association which relaunched this study after a period of inactivity. But they are now the subject of a publication in a journal, the Journal of Clinical Medicineand in the meantime, the researchers were able to refine their conclusions.
They therefore noticed that the rise in obesity particularly affected 18-24 year olds. The latter are, in absolute terms, the least affected age group with a tenth – 9.2% – obese, but this share has quadrupled over the past twenty years.
Another notable conclusion, obesity is more or less common depending on the region: it affects more than 20% of people questioned in Hauts-de-France or Grand Est. This geographical distribution corresponds in particular to socio-economic realities, with the poorest regions tending to be more affected.
“People are not ‘addicted’ to bad food but they are encouraged to buy it because it’s cheaper,” notes Annick Fontbonne. “Good quality foods, foods that are said to be healthy, are generally more expensive.”