Two new studies released Tuesday show that America continues to lose ground in its ongoing war against obesity.
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A shocking 40 percent of women in the U.S. are obese.
However, in 2013-2014, there was an increase, with 38 percent of American adults classified as obese. An index of 25 or higher is considered overweight, while an index of 30 or more is considered obese.
To do so, the researchers looked at data taken from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
In the study, researchers gathered new data on US obesity rates from a national survey conducted during 2013-2014, and also looked at changes in obesity rates over the previous nine-year period.
Study Author Cynthia Ogden, ph.D. said “we saw that there had been no change in men in either obesity or extreme obesity, but there had been an increase in women in both obesity and extreme obesity and when we adjusted for potential contributors of obesity by age, race, Hispanic origin, education and smoking status that didn’t change the results”.
A new federal plan to improve food labels, highlighting calories and added sugars, might help combat rising obesity, combined with more regulations of soda and junk food, Freedhoff said, though he thinks these tactics might not be aggressive enough. BMI is not a ideal measure of health and is based on a person’s weight and height ratio rather than their actual amount of body fat.
Max Gomez explained the rate of obesity in men has leveled off, but there remains a very high percentage of overweight men.
About 17 percent of children are obese, which is the same as earlier reports. Those who have a BMI at or above the 95th percentile for kids of the same age and gender on the CDC’s growth charts are considered obese; if their BMI is at least 20 percent higher than that cut-off, they are counted as morbidly obese.
The research also found that although obesity decreased among children aged two to five over the past 25 years, it surged among teens.
Hot on the heels of news that the United States childhood obesity rate keeps creeping up, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have an update on the situation among adults: As of 2014, 37.9 percent of USA adults are obese, compared with 34.6 in 2006.
“The obesity epidemic in the United States is now three decades old, and huge investments have been made in research, clinical care, and development of various programs to counteract obesity”.
“Although it is impossible to know what the extent of the obesity epidemic would have been without these efforts, the data reported … certainly do not suggest much success”, wrote Dr. Jody Zylke and Dr. Howard Bauchner, the deputy editor and editor in chief, respectively, of JAMA.
“Perhaps it is time for an entirely different approach”, they wrote, “one that emphasizes collaboration with the food and restaurant industries that are in part responsible for putting food on dinner tables”.
Other studies suggest the epidemic will only worsen.
Dr. David Katz is director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, in Derby, Conn., and president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.
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And the effects extend far beyond disease.
