Rich countries and countries aspiring to be rich top the list of countries with the most number of obese people in the world.

A recent study published in the medical journal, The Lancet, discovered the number of overweight and obese people in the world rose from 857 million in 1980 to 2.1 billion in 2013. The study defined obesity as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) or weight-to-height ratio equal to or greater than 30. Overweight is defined as having a BMI greater than or equal to 25 and lower than 30.

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In the decades-long study, researchers conducted what they claim is a first-of-its-kind analysis of trend data from 188 countries. The study found out that more than 50 percent of the world's 671 million obese people live in just 10 countries:

1. United States

2. China

3. India

4. Russia

5. Brazil

6. Mexico

7. Egypt

8. Germany

9. Pakistan

10. Indonesia

The highest proportion of the world's obese people, 87 million or 13 percent, live in the United States. China and India combined account for 15 percent of the world's obese population.

Obesity rates in the study were age-standardized or adjusted for differences in population size and ages over time and across countries.

"The most concerning thing is that there's not a single country that has seen a decline in obesity in the past thirty years .... We hoped there would be some examples of success that you could latch onto. But there's a complete lack of success stories in bringing down obesity," said study co-author Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington-Seattle.

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