The data is out there: the World Obesity Federation (WOF) has reported that global obesity healthcare costs will expand by approximately 1.2 trillion U.S. dollars in the next five years. Concurrently, the WOF’s Global Obesity Observatory atlas, which visually presents the percentage of obese individuals in each nation, has been updated with new information that reveals a gender disparity.

The Obesity Observatory, which was created with the help of a grant from the European Commission, displays recent data collected from 1991-2017. Contained in this updated data is the revelation that obesity is not just a phenomenon that occurs in developed nations. In fact, several developing countries, such as Egypt and Paraguay, have obesity levels greater than those of notable developed nations like France and Spain. The data also exhibits a gender disparity: most nations have greater obesity levels in their female population. This disparity was most pronounced in Middle Eastern and North African nations, yet it is shown in Western countries like England and America as well. The WOF accredits this to the restriction of women’s domestic rights in Muslim nations, as well as social pressure for mothers to stay at home.

On October 11th, otherwise known as World Obesity Day, the WOF makes the public privy to eye-opening information that they hope will further the awareness of obesity worldwide. One of the lastest World Obesity Day publications was a table that displayed the approximate predicted increase in global obesity healthcare costs that will take place in the next six years.

The table’s calculations use a metric known as Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which asserts that differences in currency value are transcended by the fixed prices of goods and services, as its measurement for global cost increases. In the next five years alone, the total healthcare costs of obesity will increase to 1136272.4 PPP units, indicating that there will be a cost increase of about 1.2 trillion dollars. The table displays costs for individual nations as well as the entire globe.