Dietary Patterns, Economic Development and the Global Overweight and Obesity Pandemic

Nowadays, overweight and obesity are among the major global health concerns. These diet-related diseases impose high tangible and intangible costs, and threaten the sustainability of health-care systems, not just in advanced economies but also in developing countries. The main purpose of this paper is to study the impact of economic development on the ongoing nutrition transition processes and, as a result, on the prevalence of overweight and obesity worldwide. We provide a framework to model factors most influencing consumers’ behaviour towards healthy and unhealthy foods. We thus collect figures for 185 countries over the period 2012–2014 regarding the shares of simple (sugar and sweetener) and complex (cereal) carbohydrates in each country’s total dietary energy supply, to meet three goals: 1) estimate the impact of these shares on the country’s prevalence of overweight and obesity; 2) compute an indicator of country’s dietary pattern; and 3) measure the reactivity of both dietary pattern and overweight and obesity to raising living standards. We find that unhealthy eating habits and the associated prevalence of excessive body fat accumulation tend to behave as a ‘normal good’ in developing countries, but as an ‘inferior good’ in developed ones. These results may have helpful implications for both public health authorities and health-care industry experts involved in developing assessment of the future evolution of the so-called ‘obesity pandemic’.