Global Courant 2023-04-26 11:57:58
SEOUL – For 27-year-old Choi, her weight has been the main focus of her life lately.
The after-work dinners at her new job and frequent dates with her new boyfriend have led her to lift the bathroom scale above 110 lbs for the first time in her life, prompting her to frantically cancel a gym membership. , fitness equipment and organic meal kits.
“I just feel so big since I put on the extra weight. I want to reduce my weight to under 50 kg,” she said.
With a height of 165 cm and a body mass index of about 20, smack in the middle of the “normal” range, she could be the poster child for modern Korean women because she sees herself as much fatter than she actually is.
But while South Korea’s population is among the slimmest of OECD member countries, figures indicate that obesity is becoming a growing problem in a country that has experienced rapid changes in diet and lifestyle patterns.
How thick is fat?
Like Choi, many South Korean women tend to see themselves as “fat” when in reality they are not.
In March, researchers at Konkuk University Medical Center found that South Korean women are more likely to overestimate their own weight.
They analyzed data from women ages 20 to 40 from 2001 to 2018 and found that the tendency to overestimate someone’s weight increased from about 10 percent to 20 percent during that time.
In other words, one in five women surveyed in 2018 thought they were fatter than they actually are.
Despite what many locals believe, the proportion of the population that is obese is lower in South Korea than in most other developed countries.
According to 2018 OECD data, obese adults made up only 5.9 percent of the population, the second lowest among OECD member countries after Japan. By comparison, 40 percent of adults in the US were obese.
Nevertheless, data from the local health authority Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency suggest a very different picture.
According to this data, 34.6 percent of South Koreans were obese in 2018, much more than the 5.9 percent the OECD reported for Korea.
