Huge rise in child obesity

THE world had 10 times as many obese children and teenagers last year than in 1975, but underweight kids still outnumbered them, a new study says.

Warning of a “double burden” of malnutrition, researchers wrote in The Lancet medical journal that the rate of increase in obesity far outstripped the decline in undernutrition. The team found that there were 74 million obese boys aged 5-19 in 2016, up from six million four decades earlier.

For girls, the tally swelled from five million to 50 million. There were 117 million underweight boys and 75 million underweight girls last year.