Every fifth person in the 15-49 years age group in Uttar Pradesh is overweight or obese.
A gender wise assessment shows that 21.3 per cent women and 18.5 per cent men belong to overweight/obese category.
The data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) four and five indicates a five-percentage point rise on the count.
According to the health experts, against 16.5 per cent of the people falling in the category in NFHS-4, the number has gone up to 19 per cent for women and 6 per cent for men in NFHS-5.
Nearly 23 per cent of men and 24 per cent of women were found to have a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or more -- which is a 4 per cent increase for both genders over 2015-16.
Healthy body weight is calculated on the basis of body mass index (BMI) formula. Anyone with a BMI of more than 30 is considered obese and a person with a BMI between 25 and 29.9 is deemed overweight.
Stating that once obesity was considered a problem of the wealthy countries, experts admitted that it was shifting towards countries where a majority of the population falls in low- and middle-income groups.
Overall, the worldwide prevalence of obesity has nearly tripled over the past four decades.
Dubbing it as a rising nutrition concern, doctors said that excessive body weight was an open invitation to diseases.
"While prevention is often free of cost, living with the disease is an economic burden. Obesity causes diseases and also tends to make management of simple conditions difficult. In fact, several lives lost during the pandemic were linked to excessive body weight," said Dr Ram Upadhyay, a medical scientist and commentator.
A WHO report noted that too much body fat increases the risk of noncommunicable diseases, including 13 types of cancer, type-2 diabetes, heart problems and lung conditions.
Blaming unhealthy eating habits, poor stress management and lack of exercise for the trend, experts urged people to be mindful of risks to their health.
Public health experts called for policy and action on the count stating that "the size of any public health problem grows bigger with UP on account of its sheer population size." (SP/NewsGram)