MAP
Instruction
On top the different years are shown. You may choose which year should be displayed, by clicking on it. The sliders on the bottom can be used to restrict the countries shown which are within the chosen range of obesity rate. Zoom buttons have been added to further inspect the data. By clicking on a country, a popup appears showing the country's name and both rates for the specific country.
Discussion
The map does not show a clear correlation between the obesity rates and the urbanisation rates of the countries. In the following animated figure, the obesity rates are plotted against the urbanisation rates for each country. The plot of 1980 seems to show a light correlation. This correlation seems to become less strong during the next decades.
It has to be pointed out clearly that we did not test this possible correlation on its statistical significance. This should be done in a further study. Moreover, it should be tested if the correlation is based on causality. Even though, we do not have a statistically useful result, we can at least say that our findings are congruent to those found in literature: A study shows that in 1985, in three quarters of the countries studied people in urban areas had higher BMIs than people in rural areas (CBC 2019). “But 30 years later, the BMI gap between urban and rural dwellers in many countries had shrunk dramatically, or even reversed” (ibid.). In rural areas the mean BMI increased by 2.1 between 1985 and 2017, whereas in urban areas, it only increased by 1.3 (women) or 1.6 (men) (ibid.).
