For every four adults in the world who are malnourished five more are overweight, 30 percent of them clinically obese, according to the World Health Organization. The scourge of obesity, bringing in its train a host of health and economic problems that could one day cripple economies, is more prevalent in some countries than others, but still constitutes a global epidemic, says WHO. A billion people out of the world’s six billion population are now considered overweight, compared with 800 million who do not have enough to eat. Some 2,000 health experts gather in Boston, Massachusetts on Friday for a four-day conference on treatment and prevention of obesity, organized by the North American Society for the Study of Obesity (NAASO). While accounting for less than five percent of the population in China, Japan and some African nations, the proportion of obesity — at the other extreme — exceeds 75 percent in some urban zones of Samoa, and 45 percent among certain demographic groups in the United States, notably among African Americans. And even within China, more than 20 percent of the people in certain cities are classified as seriously overweight. The international standard for […]