Being fat, lazy slugs would seem to no longer be a US-specific problem:

A staggering one billion of the world's population of 6.45 billion is overweight, warns the World Health Organization. And rates of overweight and obesity are rising dramatically in poorer countries, not just wealthy nations.

If the current trend continues, by 2015 there will be 1.5 billion overweight people in the world. Being overweight or obese greatly increases a person's risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and other chronic diseases.

While the New Scientist article largely echoes the alarmist tone of the press release it's based on, there is an alternative interpretation. It would seem, for the first time in humanity's 1.5 million-year history, that famine has finally been defeated.

Oh there are still famines to be sure. Africa is quite famous for large numbers of hollow-eyed children and skeletal adults wandering like zombies across the landscape. But what is largely ignored by the media and the various NGOs for whom famine is a reason to exist is that these famines are essentially human-caused. Revolution, civil war, government bungling, cronyism, and misguided social engineering are the primary causes of starvation in this modern world, not crop failure. And, unlike locust plagues or hail or draught, human-caused problems have human-caused solutions. We have learned to protect ourselves from forces we cannot control. The trick now is to get a handle on the forces we can.

Stasists, technocrats, and various PC busybodies may bemoan the "impropriety" of being fat. Yet they seem to sometimes ignore that a fat, happy child can be taught to change their diet. A starving one can't be taught anything at all.