PEOPLE living in rural areas are driving the rise in obesity levels, according to a new study.
The worldwide population study has debunked assumptions that increasing global obesity rates are caused by more people choosing to live in cities.
The fresh study follows the release of major health report late last year by University of South Australia that found a staggering one in three people in the Limestone Coast have high blood pressure.
The Limestone Coast also has high rates of depression, anxiety, sleep disorders and allergies.
Dr Tiffany Gill – a senior research fellow with the University of Adelaide – said the results contradict the common assumption that rising global obesity rates were caused by more people choosing to live in cities.
“These findings will help us reassess how we tackle obesity and its many related health issues,” Dr Gill said.
“We tend romanticise rural living, associating it with an active, healthy lifestyle but in fact cities often provide better access to exercise, recreational activities and affordable, fresh, nutritious food compared to rural areas.”
The research was led by the Imperial College London and published in Nature.
It analysed height and weight data of more than 112 million adults across urban and rural areas of 200 countries between 1985 and 2017.
Local researchers contributed data from the North West Adelaide Health Study, which has been collecting information about height, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol and other factors from around 4000 people in Adelaide’s north-west since 1999.
The height and weight measures were used to calculate body-mass index, an internationally recognised scale indicating whether a person has a healthy weight for their height.
During the period of the study, BMI rose by an average of 2kg/m2 in women and 2.2kg/m2 in men globally.
This equates to an average weight gain of five-to-six kilograms per person.
More than half of the global rise over the study’s 33-year span was because of BMI increases in rural areas.
Average BMI in rural areas rose 2.1kg/m2 in both men and women, but in cities the increase was just 1.3kg/m2 in women and 1.6kg/m2 in men.
For rural men, Australia was one of the countries with the biggest difference.
The average rural BMI was more than 0.35kg/m2 above the urban figure.
These results illustrate striking changes in the geography of BMI over the past three decades.
In 1985, BMI was higher in cities than rural areas in more than three quarters of the countries involved in the study.
Those differences have shrunk or even reversed in many of those countries.
