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With obesity rates continuing to rise around the globe and the majority of Americans now obese or overweight, (emphasis added) it’s easy to see that we are losing the battle of the bulge.

Aside from isolated areas of improvement where people are, in fact, losing weight — in a city here, a neighborhood there — no country has succeeded in reversing its obesity epidemic. That failure has begun to have dire consequences: shortened lives, compromised life quality and skyrocketing health care costs, scientists reported Wednesday (Feb. 18) in a special issue of the journal The Lancet.

In a series of six critical articles covering the health, policy, economics and politics of obesity, scientists lay out what society has been doing wrong and call for a new global action plan to meet what they call the “modest” goal of the World Health Organization: no increase in the prevalence of obesity from now through 2025.

“There are clear agreements on what strategies should be implemented and tested to address obesity,” said Christina Roberto, an assistant professor […]