According to WHO, in 2005 more than 1.6 billion adults (> 15 years old) are overweight (about 26.67% of the world population), and among them a minimum of 400 million are obese; WHO further predicted that in 2015, about 2.3 billion people will be overweight, with 700 million reach obesity.

A statistics from the International Obesity Taskforce (IOTF) showed that 1.7 billion of the world's six billion population is overweight! It is estimated that the global market of weight loss products is worth US$ 370 billion per year (the market for male treatments stands for US$ 50 billion dollars per year). The obesity rate in the U.S. is 61%, and the U.S. government spent 75 billion U.S. dollars trying to solve the problem of obesity; in the U.S. alone, 500 thousand people directly or indirectly died from obesity in 2003. In the U.K. the obesity rate is 51% (about half of the adults are overweight or obese) and it’s 54% in Russia and 50% in Germany. Statistics from the Worldwatch Institute showed that, in Europe , over 50% of the adults aged 35 to 65 are obese. At the 11th European Congress on Obesity held in Vienna, China was listed on world obesity charts for the first time. Data showed that the increase rate of obesity in China in latest 10 years was close to that in the U.S. for the past 50 years, which suggests that the obesity problems should never be neglected even in the emerging countries. According to the 8th International Congress on Obesity held in U.S. California in 2000, the U.S. ranked No.1 on the global obesity list. Although European countries did not rank as high as the U.S., the condition was also very severe. Emerging countries are not free from obesity problems: 60% population in Mexico is obese, while 1 in 12 males and 1 in 16 females in China suffer from obesity problems, and those figures are increasing rapidly year by year.