The World Health Organization has just published a list ranking 36 nations in order of the share of their populations that have a normal bodyweight. Any guess where the United States falls? Third from the bottom, at 35.13 percent. The rest of Americans had a body mass index--a ratio determined by accounting for an individual's height and weight--above what's considered healthy.
Only Kuwait and the United Kingdom were fatter than the United States. Wealthy Saudia Arabia didn't rank much higher. It has ony 7% more healthy-weight individuals than we do.
Topping the healthy-weight list was the Lao People's Democratic Republic at 77.14 percent, followed by Ghana (72.4%), the Phillippines (69.51%), Japan (68.9%), the Republic of Korea (68.7%), India (62.5%), and Kyrgyzstan (61.25%).
Somewhere in the middle, all with about 50 to 54% of their populations at a healthy weight, were Colombia, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, and Finland.
Of course, it's not a complete list. There are some 200 countries. However, it says something fairly disappointing for America that Morocco, Estonia, Malaysia, and Kyrgyzstan have almost twice the proportion of healthy-weight adults that we and several other wealthy and powerful nations do. Obviously, it suggests a lot about how we spend out wealth--avoiding exercise in our automobiles and chowing down on low-cost fast food.
Source: World Health Organization Global Database on Body Mass Index (http://www.who.int/bmi/index.jsp), which was updated as of May 18, 2007.
