European Obesity Congress Winds up in Sofia

Crash diets, the dangers of eating too much white broad, gastric bands – whether they really work - and can you live off prunes?

It’s all been kicking off at the European Congress on Obesity, which ends May 31.

Experts on a growing problem throughout the world have been meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, to hammer out approaches and solutions to what is increasingly referred to as an epidemic, and which is widely attributed to increasingly sedentary lifestyles, changing eating patterns and the spread of fast food.

Fat is no laughing matter. According the respected UK medical publication, the Lancet, the total number of obese or overweight people in the world has now reached 2.1 billion, nearly 30 per cent of the earth’s population.

“Overweight and obesity have substantially increased everywhere in the world and have undoubtedly become the major health issues of the 21st century,” the University of Graz’s Hermann Toplak, warned this week in Sofia.

Other worrying data are that America is home to 13 per cent of the world’s obese people even though the US is home to only 5 per cent of the planet’s population.

Annual European congresses on obesity have been taking place each year since the first one was held in Stockholm in 1988.