Year after year, obesity continues to increase in France and it affects different age groups. In recent years, this scourge has affected the younger generations more, detailed on Monday researchers conducting a landmark study on the subject. Obesity is experiencing “a sharp increase in the youngest age groups”, summarized Annick Fontbonne, epidemiologist at Inserm, during a press conference. The researcher detailed a study she conducted on the proportion of obese or overweight adults in France in 2020.
According to this study, carried out by survey of around 10,000 people representative of the population, nearly half of French people – 47% – weigh too much compared to medical recommendations. Among them, a sixth of French people (17%) would be obese, that is to say at a level of weight considered unhealthy as opposed to simply being overweight.
This study is a reference on the subject of obesity and overweight in France, because it has been carried out regularly since the end of the 1990s. It is therefore interesting for evaluating the evolution of obesity and overweight. However, if the latter tends to stabilize or even decrease for a decade, obesity continues to affect more and more French people.
These results were already generally known, because they had been made public last year by the League against obesity, an association which relaunched this study after a period of inactivity. But they are now the subject of a publication in a journal, the Journal of Clinical Medicine, and in the meantime, the researchers have been able to refine their conclusions.
So they noticed that the rise in obesity was hitting 18-24 year olds particularly hard. The latter are, in absolute terms, the least affected age group with one tenth – 9.2% – obese, but this share has quadrupled over the past twenty years.
“People are not ‘addicted’ to bad food, but they are encouraged to buy it because it’s cheaper,” notes Annick Fontbonne. “Good quality foods, foods that are said to be healthy, they are usually more expensive. »
