The shares of overweight and obese people are increasing at a rapid rate in most of the EU countries, with 50.6% of people aged 16 years or over in the EU being overweight in 2022. People who are overweight but not obese are considered to be pre-obese.
The data come from EU statistics on income and living conditions (EU-SILC) and they relate to the 2022 reference year and cover people aged 16 years or over. They show that in the population as a whole, Latvia (59.2%) is third only to Finland (59.5%) and Malta (62%) for the percentage of the population that is overwight.
In the EU, the share of people aged 16 years or over who were considered to be overweight in 2022 varied between 31.3% in Italy and 56.7% in Latvia for females and between 51.5% in France and 69.4% in Croatia, Malta and Slovakia for males.
Among EU countries, the lowest share of females aged 16 years or over who were obese in 2022 was observed in Italy (6.1%), considerably below the next lowest share (9.8% in Bulgaria). The highest shares of obese females were recorded in Latvia (23.9%), Estonia (22.9%), Malta (22.7%) and Finland (22.0%).
In a majority of EU countries (19 of the 26 for which data are available; no data for Germany), the share of obese males was higher than the share of obese females in 2022. For example, in Croatia the share among males was 20.8%, some 8.3 percentage points (pp) above the 12.5% share among females. By contrast, a higher share of obese females was observed in 5 northern EU countries – Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland and Denmark – as well as in the Netherlands and France. The widest gaps with higher shares for women were recorded in Latvia and Estonia (both 2.6 pp).
There was a clear difference between the sexes in terms of the shares of males and females who were pre-obese. In 2022, the share of pre-obese males was consistently higher than that for females in all EU countries. Differences ranged from 8.4 pp in Hungary and 8.5 pp in Latvia to 18.8 pp in Slovakia and 18.9 pp in Italy.
The full data are here.
