GlobalHealthCuratedhigh confidence

Diabetes and Obesity

A metabolic epidemic reshaping health systems in every income bracket.

Severity score

67.7

Critical · default weighting

Trajectory

Worsening

What this is

More than 800 million adults live with diabetes and over a billion with obesity, roughly quadruple the numbers of a generation ago. Complications include blindness, kidney failure, amputation and cardiovascular death. Food environments, urban design and marketing drive the trend faster than treatment can absorb it.

Score breakdown

Loss of life

74

Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.

Lives negatively impacted

92

People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.

Financial cost

72

Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.

Environmental impact

6

Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.

Trajectory

72

Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.