The World Health Organization claims that globally for every four malnourished adults, five more are overweight while 30 percent of them are clinically obese. The massive number is already constituting to a global epidemic.

The world's six billion population counts 1 billion people overweight while 800 million are underfed.

Health experts congregated for a four-day conference on managing obesity, organized by the North American Society for the Study of Obesity (NAASO) in Boston, Massachusetts.

The international standard for testing obesity is the body-mass index (BMI). One's weight in kilograms is divided by the square of one's height in meters.

In the United States alone, 30 percent of adults are considered clinically obese which accounts to around 60 million of the population.

In Europe, Britain holds the top spot with 23 percent while Italy only has eight percent of its people as severely overweight.

Overall, the EU has some 200 million overweight adults.

Excess weight has also been steadily climbing among children with 14 million overweight pre-teen youngsters in the EU and 3 million of those obese.

While in the U.S., the proportion of overweight children tripled for ages six to nineteen between 1980 and 2002.

The booming rates of obesity is largely responsible for the rising rates in chronic diseases like type-2 diabetes, hyper-tension, arteriosclerosis, cerebral hemorrhaging, and various types of cancer.