Obesity has reached pandemic proportions throughout the world and is now the greatest single contributor to chronic disease, an international conference was told here. "This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world," Australia's Monash University professor Paul Zimmet, chair of the 10th International Congress on Obesity, said on the opening day of the conference. The spread of the problem was "led by affluent western nations, whose physical activity and dietary habits are regrettably being adopted by developing nations," Zimmet told more than 2,000 delegates. The world now has more fat people than hungry ones, according to...
