Eating a healthy and balanced diet in Peru seems to be easy. The country offers an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetable, grains, fish and meat, as well as numerous superfoods and herbs and all this still for affordable prices.
Nevertheless, fast food, soft drinks, processed foods, sugary juices, cooking with lots of oil and decreasing exercise is by now omnipresent in Peru, resulting in a population that gets fatter and fatter.
According to international rankings, Peru occupies position number 3 after Mexico and Chile on the list of Latin American countries with the highest obesity rates.
The Peruvian National Institute of Health reported recently that 40% of people in Peru are overweight, about 20% of these are obese. That’s over 12 million Peruvians having a few kilos too many on the scale.
The cities with the highest percentages of overweight and obese citizens are Lima, Tacna, Arequipa and Cajamarca.
In Lima 2,172,175 people are overweight and an additional 561,125 obese. Interestingly, with between 10.4% and 11.9% of the district's population the percentage of overweight and obese people in considered poorer districts of the Peruvian capital such as San Juan de Lurigancho, Villa el Salvador, Ate, Los Olivos, San Martin de Porres, Carabayllo, Villa Maria del Triunfo, Chosica, Puente Piedra and Pachacamac is much higher than in considered middle and upper class districts such as Miraflores, Lince and Jesus Maria with around 8%.
While most overweight and obese Peruvians are between 30 and 59 years old, the numbers in the age group 20 to 29 years and even in children between 5 to 9 years old are increasing.