274 million Latin American adults are overweight or obese, GBD 2023 estimates

A new regional analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study puts a number on Latin America's slow metabolic emergency: an estimated 274 million adults now carry excess weight, and high body-mass index cost the region 15.8 million years of healthy life in a single year [s1].

The paper, published in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas on September 11, uses GBD 2023 estimates to track prevalence and attributable burden from 1990 to 2023 across the region, disaggregated by country, sex and age [s1]. These are the figures, and the caveats that come with modelled estimates.

The scale

Among adults aged 25 and older, the region had an estimated 274 million people (72.1%) who were overweight or obese in 2023, of whom 127 million were classified as obese [s1]. Set against the global picture, that is a region well past the tipping point: WHO estimates that in 2022, 2.5 billion adults worldwide were overweight, 890 million of them living with obesity [s2].

The heaviest national prevalences are concentrated in the Southern Cone and Mexico. Chile recorded the highest age-standardised prevalence among adults, at 79.9%, and also among adolescents and young adults aged 15 to 24, at 51.9% [s1]. Mexico had the highest age-standardised prevalence among children aged 5 to 14, at 28.4% [s1].

The trajectory is the story

A prevalence figure is a snapshot; the trend is what alarms the authors. Overall, obesity prevalence rose monotonically, with adults showing a yearly change above 0.7 percentage points since 2015 in most subregions [s1]. Colombia experienced the fastest percentage increase in adult overweight and obesity from 1990 to 2023, at 68.9% [s1].

The sharpest signal is among the young. The authors report a 346.3% increase in obesity prevalence among adolescents and young adults, which they read as a warning of "growing future pressure on health-care system capacity" [s1]. A cohort entering adulthood with this much accumulated risk sets the region's chronic-disease burden for decades, because the complications of obesity arrive years after the weight does.

What the weight does

The analysis quantifies harm in disability-adjusted life-years — DALYs, a combined measure of years lost to early death and to living with illness. In 2023, 15.8 million DALYs were attributable to high BMI in the region [s1]. Mexico had the highest age-standardised DALY rate, at 3414.2 per 100,000 [s1].

The damage runs through familiar channels. Diabetes mellitus, ischaemic heart disease and chronic kidney disease were the top three contributors to high-BMI-attributable DALY rates for both sexes [s1]. That ordering matters for policy: it means the return on preventing weight gain shows up as fewer heart attacks, less dialysis and less insulin, not as a line item labelled "obesity."

A subtler finding on mortality

Not every trend pointed the same way. In Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay, age-standardised DALY rates attributable to high BMI did not show a clear increase — their uncertainty intervals included zero — reflecting declining age-standardised death rates [s1]. Yet the absolute number of attributable DALYs still rose in all four countries, because of population growth and ageing [s1].

This is the distinction between rates and counts that public messaging routinely blurs. Care can be improving — fewer people dying at any given level of risk — while the total burden on the health system grows, simply because there are more older people carrying that risk. Both things are true at once.

The caveats

These are modelled estimates, not a census. GBD synthesises surveys and reports through statistical models — here, spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression — and the analysis incorporated 70 new individual-level data sources and one new report in the 2023 round [s1]. Estimates carry uncertainty intervals, and the authors are explicit about a specific data gap: measured BMI data for children aged 5 to 14 should be prioritised, because prevalence in that group is currently the least well grounded in direct measurement [s1].

WHO frames the underlying drivers as environmental rather than individual — a nutritional transition toward ultra-processed foods and urbanisation-related inactivity [s1][s2]. Globally, WHO warns that without action the costs of overweight and obesity could reach US$ 3 trillion a year by 2030 [s2]. That is the backdrop against which a region of 274 million affected adults has to design a response.

What to watch

Whether the youngest cohorts' trajectory bends. A 346.3% rise in obesity among adolescents and young adults is the number that will define the next generation of cardiovascular and kidney disease if it holds [s1].

Whether countries where death rates are falling can also bend the count, not just the rate — which means prevention upstream, not only better treatment downstream.

And whether the measurement gap in children closes, so the next GBD round rests on measured weights rather than inference.

This article is informational and is not medical advice.