2024 in review: Data & Evidence

During 2024, the Global Obesity Observatory had several key developments and saw another significant increase in usage.

Key developments included:

• Comprehensive global data updates including obesity prevalence, obesity-related drivers and co-morbidities
• Updated and new presentation maps including a new non-standard BMI cut-off feature
• The addition of under 5 years child data across the Observatory
• An update to the popular Ranking page with the new NCD RisC data
• The inclusion of the World Bank income categories across the Observatory
• The expansion of the cross-national surveys section

The maintenance of the Observatory database is a continuous task, and we are always looking to improve and update the data.

Throughout 2024, the data team added monthly updates from countries spanning the globe. Obesity data are presented for general prevalence, by age, by sex, by region, by ethnicity, by education and by socio-economic status. Where possible, trend data graphics have also been updated and created so countries can continue to monitor progress. The addition of the World Bank income categories makes it easier to compare overweight and obesity prevalence across different income groups as well as by region.

For the first time, data on children aged 0-5 years has been routinely included on the Global Obesity Observatory.  This data is available for general prevalence, by region, by socio-economic status and by parental educational status.

The data can be found on the interactive map and each individual country page. We will expand this data to be included in the presentation maps and tables in early 2025.

The data is predominantly provided by our partners UNICEF who worked alongside the World Bank to produce country estimates to track progress towards the 2030 SDG targets. However, we also present the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) data in our cross-national survey section, where infant data by region, parental education and parental socio-economic status are also included.

We have been continuing to develop the cross-national survey section to allow you to explore obesity prevalence across countries by age, education, and socio-economic status.

This section now has data from the Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative, the Global School-based Student Health Surveys, STEPS, the European Health Interview Surveys (EUROSTAT), the Demographic Health Surveys (DHS), the Health Behaviour in School Aged Children Surveys, and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS).

This section of the Observatory is particularly helpful when you want to compare countries or regions that use the same methodology. 

Throughout 2024, we applied many updates to our Rankings page - consistently our most popular page on the Observatory. This page achieves almost 2 million visits a year!

The NCD RisC estimates were updated in March 2024 for World Obesity Day. We also updated this page to include World Bank Income status.