Behold: the world's 10 fattest countries

It's a big world, after all. We're talking to you, American Samoa. Kiribati, too.


By Laurie Cunningham
GlobalPost
November 25, 2009



The world is growing smaller. And larger. See our list of the world's 10 fattest countries below. Here, a man walks past the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Aug. 17, 2009. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)


CHICAGO — If you tend to pack on a few pounds over the holidays, blame it on globalization. As the world has grown smaller, we’ve all grown larger — alarmingly so. In countries around the world, waistlines are expanding so rapidly that health experts recently coined a term for the epidemic: globesity.

The common fat-o-meter among nations is body mass index (BMI), a calculation based on a person’s height and weight. The World Health Organization defines “overweightâ€