Romania, the EU country with the lowest share of obese adults

Newsroom 21/10/2016 | 16:19

Among the EU member states, the lowest shares of obesity in 2014 among the population aged 18 or over were recorded in Romania (9.4 percent), followed by Italy (10.7 percent) and the Netherlands (13.3 percent), Belgium and Sweden (both 14.0 percent), according to Eurostat.

At the opposite end of the scale, obesity is present among 1 in 4 adults in Malta (26 percent), and among 1 in 5 in Latvia (21.3 percent), Hungary (21.2 percent), Estonia (20.4 percent) and UK (20.1 percent).

According to the European Health Interview Survey, almost 1 adult in 6 in the EU is considered obese.The share of obesity increases with age and decreases with education level.

While 46.1 percent of those aged 18 or over living in the European Union had a normal weight in 2014, slightly more than half of the adults (51.6 percent) were considered as over-weight (35.7 percent pre-obese and 15.9 percent obese) and 2.3 percent as under-weight. In other words, nearly 1 in every 6 persons aged 18 or over in the EU was obese in 2014.

The share of obese adults varies between age groups and according to education level. With the exception of those aged 75 or over, the older the age group, the higher the share of obese persons: the obesity share in the EU stood at 22.1 percent for people aged 65 to 74, while it was below 6 percent (5.7 percent) for those aged 18 to 24.

Obesity is a public health problem that can be statistically measured using the Body Mass Index (BMI) of adults.