Iceland, We Have A Lifestyle Problem: The Bad News Keeps Coming

Despite large amounts of clear-eyed data, no systemic solutions

In December 2025, we published a news piece with the headline “Icelanders Are The Heaviest Of The Nordic Nations.” The body of the article did not get any better. Icelanders are getting fatter, consuming shocking amounts of energy drinks, sleeping less, and developing lifestyle diseases including high blood pressure and diabetes.

If you’re a longtime reader of the Grapevine, you might see a theme. We’ve mentioned Iceland’s battle with lifestyle diseases, especially obesity, repeatedly since September 2009, when a report from sociology professor Stefán Hrafn Jónsson documented that Icelanders had gone from 10 percent overweight to 20 percent overweight in 2009, a level which seems quaint given recent stats. At that time, Minister of Health Ögmundur Jónasson announced that teaching children to eat better and be more physically active, along with preventive medicine, would be applied to help address the problem.

Ten years later, the problem was supersized. The Grapevine, citing an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development survey, noted that Iceland had the highest obesity rate in Europe, with 27 percent, above Malta at 26, and the UK at 21 percent.

The truth in the Skaupið joke

A local saying is that there are few jokes in Iceland, just hard truths with a smile. This year’s Áramótaskaupið, the national comedy show, dedicated a prime spot to mocking how frequently people here use Ozempic. While the use of the medication is not otherwise a frequent part of national discussion, it probably should have been.

According to the most recent alarming survey from Norden, 27.5 percent of Icelanders are obese, with a body mass index (BMI) over 30. In 2024 there were 298,939 Icelanders 18 years old or above, meaning that 82,208 Icelanders were obese. The numbers here matter because according to Sjúkratryggingar Íslands 20,398 Icelanders were on either Ozempic, Saxenda, or Wegovy in 2024. That is, 24.8 percent of all obese Icelanders require a prescription to control medical complications.

One flaw of the Skaupið joke — the population here is now using something cheaper than Ozempic. For 2025, the Icelandic state paid just over 1 billion ISK for GLP-1 medications. Most people take Wegovy (14,827 in 2025). Of the people who don’t have their state medical care pay, most opt for the less pricey Ozempic competitor. In 2023 the Icelandic state paid 3 billion for similar drugs, with the decrease in price entirely attributable to the launch of Ozempic competitors.

Familiar solutions

So what is to be done? When asked, Minister of Health Alma Möller told RÚV on the day the joint Nordic survey was published: “This isn’t new information; we’ve known for a long time that the population is overweight, both children and adults.”

The minister is not wrong, Icelanders have been the most obese of the Nordics for years now, but now new proposals are expected this January to address the problem. The minister went on to say: “I have a group working specifically on analysing these new challenges related to children’s public health, such as the use of screens and social media. This contributes to obesity, as does, for example, the marketing of unhealthy products — we don’t eat healthy enough food. […] Then there is also the consumption of energy drinks, which leads to children not getting enough sleep, and lack of sleep contributes to unhealthy eating habits, so there are many factors at play here.”
“24.8 percent of all obese Icelanders require a prescription to control medical complications.”

What exactly will be proposed remains to be seen, but some of what that will be may perhaps be gleaned in a March 2024 report written for the Ministry of Health. There it was suggested that the government’s response should be focused on some of the following: introducing free and nutritious meals in primary schools across the country, increase oversight of the marketing of unhealthy foods targeted at children, raise taxes on unhealthy food products, especially soft drinks and energy drinks, lower taxes on healthier products and strengthen preventive work and health promotion for children of all ages.

The last suggestion of these is based on work already underway in the South of Iceland, run by paediatrician Vignir Sigurðsson. According to Vignir, “The project has been successful, generated great satisfaction, and met expectations among both the participants and their parents. My sense is that the results and benefits are tangible. Both the children and their parents are extremely interested in the changes they can make to improve health. It is, of course, risky to assess success solely on the basis of weight measurements and body mass index over a six-month period. What matters most is succeeding in bringing about lasting changes in the children’s lifestyle, habits, sleep, nutritional intake, and well-being.”

The hope is that Vignir’s regional project will then be applied to the rest of the country in an attempt to battle the obesity problem at the root.

This is not an easy topic. Reading the yearly news stories as a collective, it amounts to almost body shaming. This year’s prominent mockery of the medication used to treat the epidemic also initially left us appalled. But the numbers are concerning. While it is easy to be a doomsayer, It is at least clear that there is an effort underway to address the problem.