Of the more than 7 billion people in the world, a significant number are either overweight or obese. It's true even in countries we commonly think of as underdeveloped or impossibly remote.¹ (After all, the "golden arches" can be found in El Salvador, the Czech Republic and even Siberia.)

In fact, the journal Open Heart reported that, based on body mass index (BMI), 1.5 billion people are overweight, and 500 million of them are classified as obese. Worse, it's a growing statistic.

Dr. Artemis Simopoulos, founder of the Center for Genetics, Nutrition and Health, a nonprofit educational organization in the District of Columbia, along with Dr. James DiNicolantonio, from Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas, authored the editorial.

Simopoulos asserted that nutritional guidelines focused on calorie intake have "failed miserably over the past 30 years."

"Since 1980 there have been many studies on the causes and management of obesity including behavioural studies, physical activity studies, nutritional studies ranging from high-protein, low-carbohydrate [and] low-fat, high-carbohydrate low-calorie diets and drugs for the treatment of obesity …

Yet despite all these efforts the U.S. population continues to increase its weight and similar situations exist in other countries, both developed and developing.

In developing countries, obesity coexists with undernourished and malnourished individuals. So far, no country has been able to either prevent overweight and obesity or maintain weight loss of its population."²

Their report noted that balancing the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6 fats may prevent obesity. These fats have been balanced naturally in the human diet for millennia.

The doctors maintain that it's not the disparity between food intake and energy expended that causes obesity; the problem is the way people view what's beneficial as food and what's not.

Obesity: A Worldwide Epidemic

The World Health Organization (WHO) says a condition in which excess body fat is serious enough to impair a person's health is considered obesity, which was declared an epidemic in 1997.³

In 2008, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated the obesity epidemic as encompassing about one-third of adults worldwide.⁴ One study noted:

"The multitude of complications from obesity not only causes human suffering, but also determines the staggering economical costs associated with obesity.

Depending on the mathematical model used to estimate the costs, they range between about 6 percent and 16 percent of total health care expenditures in the U.S. Given the relentlessly increasing prevalence of obesity, these costs are likely to increase."⁵

The same review noted that obesity:

• Was once a disease associated with wealthy people, but it's now higher among lower socioeconomic and minority groups, such as African-Americans, Hispanics and Native-Americans
• Grew from 5 percent to 15 percent between 1970 and 2000 in regard to the prevalence of obesity in children
• Is seen in more men than women; respectively 41 percent to 28 percent, but women are more apt to be extremely obese
• Is implicated in problems like type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, cancer and early death

Omega-3s and Omega-6s — What's the Difference?

Omega fats are mentioned on many food packages, some touting how many one serving amount contains, but many people don't think about whether they're "3" or "6." What these consumers don't realize is that the difference between omega-3 and omega-6 fats makes all the difference in the world.

These two fat sources should be generally equal in a person's diet. Why? Because balancing omega fats is crucial for the hormones involved in blood sugar stability, nervous system health and appetite suppression.

Further, a balance is needed for unborn babies develop normally, and for breastfeeding babies to gain the nutrition necessary to prevent chronic disease in the future.

But here's what's happened to the way food is consumed: The optimum 1:1 ratio in the intake of these two essential fats has tipped the scale to a drastically altered 16:1 in favor of omega-6s, according to another study authored by Simopoulus, published in Nutrients in March 2016.⁶

Eating too many omega-6s can precipitate two of the most prevalent health-damaging conditions: multiplied fatty white tissue and chronic inflammation, which are two of the biggest red flags indicating obesity. Negatives of these two alone include heart disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and cancer.

Conversely, studies show a connection between the consumption of omega-3 fats and a decrease in fatty tissue development, along with increases in beneficial brown fat and weight loss. Research indicates that certain groups of people tend to have more brown fat than others; namely:

• People who are slender have more brown fat than those who are obese
• Younger people have more brown fat than older people
• Individuals with normal blood sugar levels have more brown fat than those with high blood sugar

Simopoulos and DiNicolantonio believe these are indications that the system has been guided by unenlightened nutritionists for too long, and that the entire food system needs a major overhaul.