Food companies are being targeted by the World Health Organisation in a major drive to tackle childhood obesity around the world.

Rates of obesity among children and teenagers have soared 10-fold around the world in the past four decades, a global study has shown.

The World Health Organisation says excessive weight, obesity, ageing, and population growth drove a nearly fourfold increase in worldwide cases of diabetes over the last quarter- century, affecting 422m people in 2014.

People are plumping up at such a rate that by 2025 roughly a fifth of the human race will be obese, experts have warned.

More than one in 10 people around the world are obese – double the number in 1980, research has shown.