by Jhoanna Robinson, Natural News:

A study that was led by the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand found that schoolgirls in the United States and the United Kingdom are the worst in the world for having stomach fat, with half of American and British girls in both countries’ total population classified as “overfat”, making them at risk of incurring diabetes and cancer during their later years.

The new study, which was published in the journal American Cancer Society and Frontiers in Public Health, mapped the countries who had the fattest citizens in the world – more than half of the girls in these countries have too much body fat and their waist measurement is more than half their height, while under half of the boys in these countries are considered overfat.

The study analyzed data from the United Nation’s Development Programme’s Human Development Report for 2014.

“The prevalence of overfat populations in 30 of the world’s most developed countries is substantially higher than recent global estimations, with the largest growth due to a relatively recent increased number of people with excess abdominal fat,” Professor Paul Laursen of Auckland University of Technology, who is also the leader of the performance physiology team at Dunedin-based outdoor sports store High Performance Sport, said.

“Despite a levelling off appearance of being overweight and/or obese in some developed countries, the ‘overfat’ pandemic continues to grow,” Prof. Laursen added, noting that up to 90 percent of men, 80 percent of women, and 50 percent of children in developed countries are overfat. “On average, the oprevalence of ‘overfat’ adults and children in developed countries is extremely high, and substantially greater than that of overweight and obese individuals.” (Related: Three-quarters of world’s population now overweight or obese…the scourge of processed foods will bankrupt the world.)

This problem is most common in the U.S. and the U.K., where a preference for the Western diet – which comprises of red meat, refined sugars, and saturated fat but very little fiber – is very prevalent.

The study showed how other countries fared when it came to weight gain. As compared with the U.S. and the U.K.’s “overfat” percentage of girls coming in at 51.9 percent and 51.4 percent respectively, other offenders included Greece (51.3 percent), New Zealand (50.9 percent), Israel (48.8 percent), Ireland (48.7 percent), Italy (46.5 percent), Slovenia (46.2 percent), Spain (46 percent), Australia (45.2 percent), and Iceland (45.2 percent).

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