Obesity Rates Rising Again Among American Adults

The report showed the upward trend in obesity percentages from 2013-2014 in comparison to a decade ago. He points to data from the USDA’s Economic Research Service showing that Americans, on average, now eat 500 calories more daily than they did around 1970, before the obesity epidemic took off.

If you think you are overweight or your body is not what you would like it to be, you are more likely to get obese, a new study suggests. But the latest numbers show that despite a few gains, obesity rates are worsening.

Among minority groups, the data was even more troubling, indicating vastly different levels of health by racial and socioeconomic divisions. The prevalence of obesity among non-Hispanic white youth was lower than in non-Hispanic black and Hispanic youth, but no significant difference was observed between non-Hispanic black and Hispanic youth.

Ideally, that would mean only 5% of the nation’s youth were obese. In reality, that figure was 17 percent in 2011-14, according to the report. There was no real difference between boys (16.9 percent) and girls (17.1 percent).

Study: Negative body image, not depression, increases adolescent obesity risk. For young people ages 2 to 19, the rate has been holding at about 17% over the past decade or so.

The widening gap between men and women seems to be driven by what’s happening among blacks and Hispanics, said the study’s lead author, the CDC’s Cynthia Ogden.

The CDC released a report Thursday stating that more than one-third (36 percent) of American adults were obese in 2011-2014.

But for those ages 20 and older, things are still getting worse. In 1999 and 2000, 30.5% of adults were obese. That ticked up to 34.3 percent in 2005 and 2006 and 35.7 percent in 2009 and 2010 on the way to reaching 37.7 percent in 2013 and 2014, the most recent years for which data are available.

The report, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), found that adult obesity rates in the U.S. have only risen in the past three years, after having stayed relatively stable throughout the previous decade. Not only has the child obesity rate has remained steady, but the rate in preschool children (2 to 5) at 8.9 percent is still below the 9.4 percent target goal set by Healthy People 2020, a 10-year-long national initiative to improve health promotion and disease prevention efforts.

“It causes high blood pressure and heart disease, it causes diabetes, it causes acid reflux, it causes an increase in cancers such as breast cancer, prostate cancer, colorectal cancer”, Romanelli said.