The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published a report through its National Center for Health Statistics stating that 37.7% of American adults are obese or overweight in 2014, and this current figure is higher than the 34.9% reported for the 2012.
The CDC used data collected by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey – which is actually an ongoing survey of American kids and adults, to arrive at the statistics for this year.
According to the researchers, about 36.5% of Americans aged 20 and above had a body mass index of at least 30 between 2011 and 2014, and this places them within the bracket for obesity. Meanwhile, about 38.3% women in the US are obese according to the CDC data, and about 34.3% of men equally obese.
Further studies show that Americans tend to get fatter as they get older, while only 32.3% of youths between the ages of 20-30 were rated as being obese. But for those within the 40-50 years age bracket, their rate of obesity is 40.2%, but it declined to about 37% for adults aged 60 and above.
It must, however, be pointed out that there are differences in obesity levels between racial and ethnic groups, and to this end, only 11.7% of Asian-American adults were considered obese and 42.5% Latinos equally obese. African-Americans that are obese are 48.1% – the higher number, and 34.5% of whites categorized as obese.
Children must have a BMI that places them above the 95% for their age and gender according to CDC’s guidelines effective from 2000 to be considered obese as adults, and this would show that only 5% of kids in the country are obese. But between 2011 and 2014, this number was 17% – with the researchers pointing out that 16.9% of boys are obese and 17.1% of girls obese – a very slight difference indeed.
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The researchers pointed out that the rate of obesity rises with age, and people tend to gain weight as they get older, underscoring the spike of 17.5% for children between the age of 6 and 11, which further rose to 20.5% for teens between the age of 12 and 19, according to the study.
All things being equal, it must be shown that obesity comes with certain health risks, and these include heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cancers, stroke, osteoarthritis, and problems associated with reproductive health.
