PRAGUE: Europe faces an obesity crisis of “enormous proportions” as unhealthy diets and physical inactivity inflate waistlines and health costs, the World Health Organization claimed Wednesday.

Nearly all adults in Ireland — one of Europe’s fattest nations — will be overweight by 2030, the European Congress on Obesity in Prague was told.

“Even in countries with a traditionally lower prevalence of obesity such as Sweden, obesity rates are predicted to rise sharply,” said a statement issued by congress organizers.

“The data highlight a serious problem for many countries.”

The ballooning burden of overweight and obesity, a preventable condition mainly caused by lifestyle factors, is a growing cause of disease and disability around the world.

According to WHO statistics, obesity has more than doubled since 1980, with up to 600 million adults affected in 2014.

More than 1.9 billion people, 39 percent of all adults in the world, were overweight.

Among children younger than five, 42 million were overweight or obese in 2013, according to the WHO, which has as a stated goal to halt the rise in obesity by 2025.

More of the world’s population now lives in countries where weight and obesity kills more people than famine.

People are classified overweight if they have a BMI (body weight index, a ratio of weight to height) of 25 and higher, and obese from a BMI of 30.

The new research underlines that Europe “will face an obesity crisis of enormous proportions by 2030,” said the research, which covered 53 countries in the WHO’s Europe region.