Three measures across 188 countries. Obesity runs from 1980; diabetes and sugar are published at intervals and show each country’s most recent reading.
Source: IDF Diabetes Atlas, WHO Global Health Observatory and FAO food balance sheets, via Our World in Data. Obesity runs as an annual series from 1980. Diabetes and sugar are published at intervals rather than yearly, so those views show each country's most recent reading with the year on hover. Sugar is supply, not consumption — calories entering a country's food system per person per day, before any account of waste, which means it overstates what people actually eat, probably by a fifth or more. Diabetes prevalence covers ages 20 to 79 and includes both type 1 and type 2, though type 2 accounts for the large majority and is the type associated with diet.
This distinction governs how the third view should be read.
FAO food balance sheets measure what enters a country’s food system: production, plus imports, minus exports and non-food uses, divided by population. What they cannot measure is what happens next — how much is thrown away at retail, in restaurants, or in homes.
Waste sits between supply and consumption, and it is substantial. Actual intake is likely a fifth or more below the figures shown here, and the gap is wider in wealthy countries where retail and household waste are higher.
So the map is useful for comparing countries and tracking change over time. It is not a measure of how much sugar people eat, and a figure of 400 calories a day does not mean the average person consumes 400 calories of sugar.
Read alongside the food waste map, which estimates the missing piece.
The temptation with these three on one map is to read a causal chain: sugar leads to obesity leads to diabetes. The data cannot support that, and the relationship is more complicated than the sequence suggests.
Sugar supply and diabetes prevalence correlate weakly across countries. Several high-sugar countries have modest diabetes rates; several low-sugar countries have severe ones. The Gulf states and parts of South Asia record among the world’s highest diabetes prevalence with unremarkable sugar supply.
Genetics, body composition at a given BMI, physical activity, total calorie intake and diagnostic capacity all intervene. South Asian populations develop type 2 diabetes at lower BMI thresholds than European ones, which alone breaks any simple mapping from obesity to diabetes.
Presenting them together is useful precisely because the correlation is imperfect. Where three related measures diverge, something interesting is happening.
Obesity is the one continuous series. It runs annually from 1980, and the trend is the most dramatic on this site — almost every country has risen, most of them substantially. The hover panel gives each country’s change since 1980.
Diabetes prevalence depends on diagnosis. A country with limited health infrastructure may have high true prevalence and low recorded prevalence, because the condition goes undetected. The IDF models around this, but the estimates carry more uncertainty where health systems are weaker.
BMI is a crude instrument. It does not distinguish muscle from fat, and the 30 threshold was calibrated on European populations. Applied globally it misclassifies in both directions.
Diabetes here includes both types. Type 1 is autoimmune and unrelated to diet; type 2 accounts for the large majority and is the type associated with weight and nutrition. The published figure combines them.
Related work:
Data from the IDF Diabetes Atlas, WHO Global Health Observatory and FAO food balance sheets, via Our World in Data.