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Obesity in America and other Western nations is widely known, observed, studied and reported. The WHO (World Health Organization) has examined trends in other nations:

The World Health Organization, which considers global obesity an epidemic, notes that obesity rates for Europe have tripled in recent years. In eastern Germany, about 26 percent of women are obese, while 20 percent of men are. In Russia, the figure is 27 percent for women and 11 percent for men.

While the book “French Women Don’t Get Fat” has been popular in weight-conscious America, the fact is that French women do get fat. So do French men. Nearly 10 percent of French women and 11 percent of French men are considered obese by the WHO.

Like its fast-expanding economy, the waistlines of Chinese citizens have been growing; the obesity rate for both men and women has risen to greater than 20 percent, according to a recent study, up from less than 1 percent in 1990. Morocco, Indonesia and Brazil also have experienced large weight gains in recent years.

In Mexico, an astounding 71 percent of women are overweight. Popkin and others attribute this partly to an increased consumption of sweetened soft drinks.

“In virtually all of Latin America and much of the Middle East and North Africa, at least 1 of 4 adults is overweight,” Popkin, who is consulting with the Chinese and Mexican governments, wrote in this month’s Scientific American. Even “desperately poor countries such as Nigeria and Uganda are wrestling with the dilemma of obesity.”

Overall, 1.6 billion of the world’s adults were overweight in 2005, the WHO found, and more than 400 million were obese. By 2015, those numbers are expected to nearly double. Several countries have found themselves improbably struggling simultaneously with hunger and obesity.