FastFoodAdvertisingand ItsEffectson RisingObesityinYoungAdults in India

With the abundance of modern-day media platforms used for fast food advertising, along with food delivery applications, exposure to junk food has been at an all-time high in India. Although this may allow convenience of purchase, that may not necessarily be the best thing. This has allowed an unhealthy lifestyle of junk food consumption leading to this becoming habitual. Visual form of advertising in the fast-food industry along with adults and young adults having widespread access to smartphones and the internet has become a vicious combination which is often overlooked. This is most prevalent on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc. Furthermore, delivery apps like Swiggy and Zomato have made this issue worse than it once was. The latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, conducted in 2019-21), the most comprehensive household survey of health and social indicators by the government, found that 7.4% of teenagers under are now overweight compared with 2.1% in 2015-16. Although the percentage seems small, with a population of 140 crores, the number comes down to roughly 1.4 crore children. Furthermore, based on data by the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), the percentage of young adults aged 18-49 years who are overweight or obese increased from 11% in NFHS- 2 to 15% in NFHS-3. Undernutrition is more prevalent in rural areas, whereas overweight and obesity are more than three times higher in urban areas. According to the fifth round of the NFHS conducted between 2019 and 2021, about 6.4 per cent of women and 4.0 per cent of men aged 18-49 are obese. Around 17.6 per cent women and 18.9 per cent men in the same age group are overweight, but not obese. This means that about a fourth of young women in India are overweight and a little over a fifth of men are above the normal body weight.