Overweight in Europe

What share of the adult population in Europe is overweight?

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A long time ago, we looked at which European countries have the highest obesity rates. The obesity tells us what percentage of adults have an extremely unhealthy BMI (≥30), but it’s also good to look at the share of adults that have an unhealthy BMI (≥25).

The countries with a high obesity rate, unsurprisingly also have high rates of overweight people. Malta is the second most obese country in Europe and also the most overweight country in Europe. Switzerland is the least obese country in Europe, but also the second least overweight country in Europe.

But we also see quite a few countries like Estonia, Finland, Iceland, North Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia that have relatively low rates of obesity, but have some of the highest shares of people that are overweight in Europe.

The most shocking fact is probably that in almost every country in Europe, more than half of all adults are overweight. In Malta (62.5%), Iceland (62.0%) and Latvia (60.4%) it’s even over 60%. The only European countries where less than 50% of the population is overweight are Italy (41.9%), Switzerland (45.6%), France (46.4%), Cyprus (47.9%), Montenegro (48.1%), the Netherlands (48.3%), Belgium (48.9%) and Luxembourg (49.7%). But let’s be honest, even Italy’s score of 41.9% is shockingly high.

Data for this map comes from the Eurostat.