Health

U.S. Obesity Rates Stabilizing, Study Says

Updated: 5 hours 2 minutes ago   Print Text Size E-mailMore

David Knowles Writer

(Jan. 13) --The good news is that American obesity rates may have plateaued. The bad news is that 68 percent of U.S. adults remain either overweight or obese.

Those are the conclusions of a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey divided its study into two parts, one that looked at recently gathered body mass index (BMI) statistics for adults and another that focused on children.
Justin Sullivan, Getty Images Obesity rates in American adults, though higher than in any other country, held steady from 2000 to 2008, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
By comparing data from 2007 to 2008 against similar measurements taken from 1996 to 2006, researchers found that the sharp rise in obesity rates witnessed over the past two and a half decades had leveled off.

Adults showed no significant change in terms of obesity from 2000 to 2008. Women have plateaued at an obesity rate of 35.5 percent, while a solid 32.2 percent of American men still qualify as obese.

Children ages 2 to 19, the group that had, over the past few decades, shown the most alarming trend line in terms of obesity, held steady at a rate of 16.9 percent.

"This was encouraging to see," Dr. William Dietz, an obesity expert for the Centers for Disease Control told Time magazine. "The results don't mean we've beaten the epidemic, but they do suggest a progression."

The CDC defines obesity as a body mass index of 30 or higher for adults, and "a BMI at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex."

Meanwhile, another recent study shows why curbing obesity rates is so important. Researchers from Columbia University and the City College of New York say that obesity has overtaken smoking as the biggest overall health threat facing the country. Based on a 15-year study during which more than 3.5 million people were interviewed on a variety of quality-of-life markers, that conclusion was based on the array of medical problems reported by the obese, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease.