Obesity, overweight, pandemics, Covid-19, noncommunicable diseases

Overweight and obesity disrupt people's quality of life and increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, hypertension, gastrointestinal diseases and cancer. It also reduces the immunity of people against epidemic diseases.

In this article, extensive search of electronic databases, review of national upstream documents as well as review of documents and reports of the Ministry of Health were conducted to comprehensively review the prevalence of obesity and its associated factors, measures taken to control this risk factor, and challenge of a syndemic of obesity and Covid-19 in Iran.

Based on the results of the national non-communicable diseases risk factors study (STEPS) in Iran, the prevalence of overweight and obesity was estimated to be 59.3% in people aged 18 years and older. Moreover, overweight and obesity were not homogeneously distributed in the country and the mean body mass index (BMI) changed from the lowest in the Southeastern to the highest in the Northwestern provinces. Covid-19 pandemic has made the situation even worse as the social distancing measures along with mental problems have made tremendous changes in people's lifestyles including physical activity and eating behaviors and this resulted in higher prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) risk factors especially overweight and obesity. Moreover, obesity increased the risk of hospitalization, admission to the intensive care units, the need for mechanical ventilation, and even mortality in patients with Covid-19. Meanwhile, anti-obesity services faced problems during the epidemics and posed a serious challenge to the world.

This study highlighted the need for targeted national policies to simultaneously control the obesity and Covid-19 pandemics.