Being overweight contributed to more than one death every hour in Belgium during 2022, according to the first estimate of its kind published by the public health institute Sciensano. The agency linked a high body mass index to 9,509 deaths that year, a figure that works out to roughly one every 55 minutes and accounts for 8.2 per cent of all deaths recorded in the country.
The estimate is Sciensano's first attempt to put a number on mortality tied directly to excess weight rather than to the diseases it drives. Researchers traced the deaths to four main groups of illness: cardiovascular disease, dementia including Alzheimer's disease, chronic kidney disease, and several types of digestive cancer.
Risk climbs sharply with age. The toll is heaviest among people aged 65 and over, and men are more likely than women to die from a weight related condition at almost every stage of life. That pattern reverses only past the age of 85, a shift researchers attribute largely to women's longer average life expectancy pushing more of them into the oldest bracket.
Broken down by specific illness, coronary heart disease was responsible for 2,009 of the deaths, Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia for 1,652, and cerebrovascular disease, which includes stroke, for 1,171.
The burden also varies sharply by region. Wallonia recorded the highest mortality rate linked to overweight at 95.21 deaths per 100,000 residents, followed by Brussels at 85 per 100,000. Flanders had the lowest rate of the three regions, at 73.60 per 100,000.
Sciensano's figures give health authorities a clearer, region by region picture of how much excess weight is costing the country in lives, at a time when obesity and related chronic disease remain a persistent public health challenge across Belgium.