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Handbook of Population pp 859–873Cite as

33 The Demography of Obesity

Part of the Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research book series (HSSR)

Abstract

A steady rise in obesity prevalence over several decades has led to considerable scholarly interest in its causes and consequences. Demographers have contributed a great deal to this body of research by examining variations within and across populations, establishing its link to mortality and morbidity, providing forecast and projections of future levels, and considering how its’ presence is variable by demographic characteristics. This chapter begins with a review of overall global trends in obesity and a discussion of the evolution of research on this topic – including background on the measures used to track obesity prevalence. Next, it offers a summary of how obesity varies by key demographic variables, followed by a discussion of its health and social consequences. Population shifts that contribute to increased obesity prevalence are considered next. The chapter concludes with methodological approaches and challenges, as well as future research directions.

Keywords

  • Demography of obesity
  • Globesity
  • BMI
  • Obesity causes and consequences
  • Health demography
  • Obesity prevalence
  • Obesity forecasts
  • Obesity epidemic
  • Morbidity/mortality risk
  • Severe obesity

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Fig. 33.1
Fig. 33.2

Notes

  1. 1.

    Obesity among adults is defined according to a standard used by the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization. The standard is the following: individuals with a body mass index (BMI, i.e., weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) that is greater than or equal to 30.00 are considered to be obese. Extreme obesity is indicated by a BMI of 40.00 or more.

  2. 2.

    The use of people-first language (ex. people with obesity instead of obese people) to describe obesity has been increasingly encouraged by scholars and members of the academic community (e.g. Obesity Action Coalition 2018; Kyle and Puhl 2014) to denote its status as a medical condition and avoid the perpetuation of weight bias (Palad and Stanford 2018).

  3. 3.

    Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1796–1874) was an astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist. He is credited with the development of the science of anthropometry, or the measurement of the human individual, and the influential construction of life tables (Siegel and Swanson 2004). The Quetelet Index was described in 1832, and was later coined as the Body Mass Index in 1972 by Ancel Keys (Eknoyan 2008).

  4. 4.

    Other measures of body fat, or adiposity, include waist-to-hip ratio, skin-fold thickness, or hydrostatic weighing. Waist-to-hip ratio in particular has been shown to have a more consistent association with health outcomes than BMI (Pischon et al. 2008).

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  1. Department of Sociology, Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA

    Ginny Garcia-Alexander

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    Dudley L. Poston Jr.

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Garcia-Alexander, G. (2019). 33 The Demography of Obesity. In: Poston, D.L. (eds) Handbook of Population. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10910-3_34

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