[Obesity and diabetes, a global problem: what does recent data tell us?].

The authors discuss the latest data regarding obesity and diabetes worldwide and in Italy. Two very important articles were recently published by the Non Communicable Disease Risk Factor Collaboration which employs hundreds of researchers around the world. The two articles respectively describe trends in Body Mass Index and diabetes, in different countries in the past 40 years, and show that there has been a startling increase in the number of obese people and people suffering from diabetes worldwide. The number of obese people (BMI>=30 Kg/m2) has risen globally from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014. Since 1975, the prevalence of obese men has more than tripled, and that of obese women has more than doubled. In Italy, the prevalence of obesity from 1998 to 2002 was 17% among adult men and 22% among adult women, but in the following ten years prevalence increased to 25% amongst both genders. In all countries, diabetes prevalence in adults has either increased (especially in low-income and middle-income countries) or at best remained unchanged, and worldwide, from 1980 to 2014, the number of adul ts with diabetes has quadrupled.