A study recently released by the Ministry of Health indicates that overweight and obesity have increased significantly in Brazil between 2006 and 2011. It surveyed 54,144 people in capitals of Brazil's 27 states from January to December 2011.
It shows that 52.6 % of men and 44.7% of women were overweight while the proportion of people with obesity increased from 11% in 2006 to 15.8% in 2011. The government considers people overweight if their fat content is more than 25% of their body weight and regards people obese if it is more than 30 %.
Alexandre Padilha, the health minister rejected the thought that the increase of overweight population was related to Brazil's rising prosperity. “Our eating habits have not changed much over the last six years, it wasn’t in this period that people started consuming full-fat milk and fatty meat. Now is the time to change course unless we want to end up with an obese population like Chile and Argentina, or even worse, the United States,”she said.
He laid emphasis on adopting public policies for children and adolescents to prevent people from becoming obese. "There is a trend toward increased weight and obesity in the country. The time has come to turn the game around so we don't catch up with countries like the United States, where more than 20 percent of the population is obese", he said.
But there are positive findings, the proportion of sedentary males in Brazil fell from 16 percent in 2009 to 14.1 percent last year and the percentage of smokers dropped from 34.8 percent in 1989 to 14.8 percent in 2011.
