Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3�6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55 of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017�and more than 80 in some low- and middle-income regions�was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing�and in some countries reversal�of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. © 2019, The Author(s)

Sedimentary sources of the mud-breccia and mud volcanic activity in the Western Alboran Basin

During the TTR-17 Leg 1 cruise in the West Alboran Basin, gravity cores were acquired from three mud volcanoes (MVs): Dhaka, Carmen and the recently discovered Maya. This paper presents micropaleontological and radiocarbon dating results from the three mud volcanoes, using cores containing mud breccias overlain by and interbedded with hemipelagic sediments. At Dhaka MV, the mud-breccia matrix contains very rare Holocene planktonic foraminifera associated with abundant reworked specimens of mixed Late Cretaceous to Mio-Pliocene age. At Carmen MV, the reworked assemblage is dominated by Miocene to Pliocene foraminifera occurring together with rare Late Cretaceous species while at Maya MV the mud-breccia matrix is characterized by the dominance of Santonian-Maastrichtian forms, with subordinate Tertiary species. Shallow-water benthic foraminifera such as Ammonia spp. and Elphidium spp. are generally rare and randomly distributed, but present at all studied sites. Based on these results, we suggest that the main sediment source of the mud-breccia extruded at Dhaka, Carmen and Maya MVs is possibly the lowermost overpressured olistostromic Unit VI (Aquitanian?-Burdigalian). Differences in the micropaleontological composition of the mud-breccia matrix at different sites are most likely due to differences in the main source layer and in the plumbing systems underneath the MVs. Radiocarbon dating of hemipelagic sediments associated to the mud-breccia allowed to define the age of the latest extrusion activities (>0.27 ka to >15.6 ka BP), which seem to be episodic, short-lived and recurrent over thousands of year