All datasets › Health
Obesity in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of obesity news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about obesity, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
Download
Data-platform copies are being published; links appear here as they go live.
Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, obesity's share of news coverage rose 1.61-fold between 2019 and 2025, from 2.74 to 4.42 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Annual counts of 51,207 matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year; complete years 2019–2025 only.
The largest annual rise in obesity's share of news between 2019 and 2025 came from 2022 to 2023, when it grew by 34.7% (from 2.85 to 3.84 articles per 10,000), after four years in which it stayed between 2.55 and 2.85.
Basis: Annual obesity articles per 10,000 articles in the index.
November 2025 was the month in which obesity took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 5.95 articles per 10,000, while February 2025 had the most obesity articles of any month (1,480).
Basis: Monthly obesity articles and monthly articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Between January 2023 and July 2026, the most common theme in obesity news was drug pricing and reimbursement (12.97% of themed obesity articles), and prescription weight-loss drugs appeared in 8.1% of them, 672.72 times their frequency in all themed news.
Basis: Machine-assigned theme labels of each article; lift against all themed news in the same window.
Novo Nordisk was the organisation named most often in obesity news between January 2023 and July 2026, appearing in 3,555 articles (10.53% of the topic), against 1,579 for Lilly.
Basis: Named organisations extracted from each article, counted once per article.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 8,217 | 54.61% | 1.13 |
| India | 1,524 | 10.13% | 0.77 |
| United Kingdom | 1,326 | 8.81% | 1.51 |
| China | 496 | 3.3% | 1.25 |
| Australia | 285 | 1.89% | 0.88 |
| Spain | 264 | 1.75% | 1.8 |
| Canada | 220 | 1.46% | 0.68 |
| Denmark | 203 | 1.35% | 11.56 |
| Brazil | 167 | 1.11% | 1.28 |
| Germany | 159 | 1.06% | 0.9 |
| France | 141 | 0.94% | 0.47 |
| Japan | 135 | 0.9% | 0.84 |
| Sweden | 133 | 0.88% | 4.04 |
| Italy | 124 | 0.82% | 0.85 |
| Norway | 107 | 0.71% | 3.5 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "obesity" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Obesity in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/obesity/