“…Overweight and obesity are major causes of metabolic, cardiovascular, neoplastic, digestive tract and several other major diseases, and consequently of premature mortality (Calle et al, 1999(Calle et al, , 2003Bianchini et al, 2002;Kenchaiah et al, 2002;Adami and Trichopoulos, 2003;Hedley et al, 2004;Flegal et al, 2005;McGee, 2005). Over the last few decades, overweight has been increasing in several developed, but also developing, countries, including the USA Flegal et al, 2002Flegal et al, , 2004aFreedman et al, 2002;Manson and Bassuk, 2003;Chopra and DarntonHill, 2004;Olshansky et al, 2005), Canada (Katzmarzyk, 2002), the Pacific countries (WHO, 2003), Australia, China and several Western European countries (Silventoinen et al, 2004), including Spain (Rodriguez Artalejo et al, 2002;Martinez et al, 2004), Great Britain (Rennie and Jebb, 2005) and Denmark (Bendixen et al, 2004).…”