Are we all equal when it comes to weight?

Humanity is constantly growing... and getting bigger! At the beginning of the 19th century, the average French person was 1.64 m tall, compared with 1.75 m two hundred years later. This growth can also be seen on the weighting scale. Over the same period, the average weight has risen from 50 kg to over 77 kg. As shown by the economist Robert W. Fogel, the same pattern has been observed in all Western populations since 1700. He interprets this phenomenon as the result of technological progress freeing humanity from under-nutrition and disease.

However, for some time now, this gradual weight gain has been accompanied by another more rapid change: overweight. According to the World Health Organisation, two and a half billion people over the age of 18 are affected, just under half of whom are obese. Given this explosion of corpulence and its associated health risks, obesity has been recognised as a disease in 1997. 

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Dialogues économiques is a digital magazine published by the Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMU, CNRS, EHESS, Centrale Méditerranée) A bridge between academic research and society, Dialogues économiques provides all citizens with the keys to economic reasoning. Articles are published every two weeks.

Despite having historically high obesity rates, the United States (42.7%), England (20.1%) and Mexico (36.9%) rank 13th, 86th and 19th respectively among the most affected countries. At the top of the rankings are the territories of the Pacific Ocean, where obesity can affect up to 80% of the population of the islands of Nauru, Tonga and the Cook Islands. With an obesity rate of 17% among adults, France stands in the 50 best countries.

Economists Fatiha Bennia, Nicolas Gravel, Brice Magdalou and Patrick Moyes have studied overweightness and obesity using the body mass index. Their innovative approach is not based on an aggregate measure of overweightness, but on the distribution of overweight people in a population.

A growing disease

Where do you draw the line between an ideal weight, overweightness and obesity? All health organisations define overweightness and obesity as an excessive accumulation of body fat. This minimalist proposal comes with a tool for estimating an individual's corpulence: the body mass index (BMI).