“Compared with 1988-1994, the distribution of the population’s weight status has increased in the past 20 years”, Dr. Graham Colditz and Lin Yang of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis said.
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Yang said it is very important to implement population-based strategies to reverse the obesity trend through physical environment interventions. BMI is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by the square of their height in meters; you can calculate your own BMI on the CDC’s website. The sample is representative of the more than 188 million Americans.
Listing the dangers of these soaring levels of obesity, the researchers pointed out that being overweight or obese increases the risk of a variety of chronic health conditions, including Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Extra weight can also make people more vulnerable to certain types of cancer. Additionally, white women were more likely to be of normal weight than overweight. The numbers for women also jumped sharply, up from 55 percent. Those with a BMI of between 25 to 29.9 percent were considered overweight and those with a BMI of over 30 percent were considered obese.
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The data was pulled from 15,208 men and women over the age of 24.
In a research letter, the authors of the analysis concluded that more than two-thirds of Americans are presently either overweight or obese, percentages that are significantly higher than a similar head count taken around two decades ago.
A survey by Association for the Study of Obesity in the United Kingdom had recently found more than a third of British adults who are obese think they are merely overweight, while a fifth of those who are overweight believe they are healthy.
The researchers estimate that during that time period, 40% of men were overweight and 35% of men were obese.
High profile attempts to tackle the problem of Americans getting heavier, such as First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Campaign to tackle childhood obesity. “We need to do what we can to change behaviors of current and future generations to reverse this preventable societal burden”.
For Asian Americans there was no available data.
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