Health at a Glance: Europe 2022
State of Health in the EU Cycle
The 2022 edition of Health at a Glance: Europe examines the key challenges European countries must address to develop stronger, more resilient health systems following the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. It includes a special focus on how the pandemic has affected young people’s mental and physical health. The report emphasises the need for additional measures to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic from scarring a generation of young people. This edition of Health at a Glance: Europe also assesses the pandemic’s disruption of a wide range of health services for non-COVID patients, as well as the policy responses European countries deployed to minimise the adverse consequences of these disruptions. It also addresses a number of important behavioural and environmental risk factors that have a major impact on people’s health and mortality, highlighting the need to put a greater focus on the prevention of both communicable and non-communicable diseases.
Overweight and obesity among adults
Being overweight is a major risk factor for various non-communicable diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and certain cancers. High consumption of calorie‑dense food, trans-fats and saturated fats, and increasingly sedentary lifestyles have contributed to growing obesity rates in Europe and more globally, further challenged by new obesogenic digital food environments (WHO Europe, 2022[1]). Overweight might cause more than 320 000 premature deaths annually in EU countries over the next 30 years if no counter-measures are taken (OECD, 2019[2]).