Obesity: Young People
(asked on 9th September 2025) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the change in obesity rates has been among young adults in the last 10 years.
NHS England publishes data from the Health Survey for England (HSE) which collects data annually on measured height and weight of adults in England which is used to calculate the prevalence of obesity in the population.
The following table shows the prevalence of obesity among young adults aged between 16 and 24 years old from 2012 to 2022, the latest period for which data is available:
Survey year | Percentage of adults aged between 16 and 24 years old living with obesity |
2012 | 13.1% |
2013 | 11.1% |
2014 | 10.8% |
2015 | 16.4% |
2016 | 11.3% |
2017 | 15.5% |
2018 | 13.5% |
2019 | 12.9% |
2020 | no data |
2021 | 7.9% |
2022 | 13.9% |
Source: HSE
Notes:
- There is no HSE data for 2020. Pandemic-related restrictions meant that fieldwork for HSE 2020 could not be carried out during most of the year.
- The data for 2021 is produced using adjusted self-reported height and weight, as pandemic-related restrictions meant the survey was not conducted as a face to face interview. The self-report data was adjusted to better align with measured height and weight, but the estimates are not directly comparable with other years of HSE data that uses measured height and weight.
Obesity prevalence among young adults has remained stable in the last 10 years, with some variation in the estimates which may be due to the small sample size of the HSE when split by age. It is expected that data from the 2024 survey will be published in early 2026.