Is the Obesity Epidemic Leveling Off? Don’t be Too Sure.
Recently, CDC epidemiologists published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association to the effect that there was not a significant change over the past 12 years in the nation’s obesity rate of 35.5% for adult men and 35.8% for adult women. Many, but not all, media reports interpreted this as meaning the obesity epidemic was leveling off. But is that really the case? Let’s look behind the headlines.
First, let’s keep in mind that, even if BMI is highly correlated with body fatness, it still misses a lot of groups for whom the BMI is a crude indicator of body fatness or excess adipose tissue.
Second, obesity prevalence should not be judged by making the BMI of 30 the sole criteria. This is better explained if you look at the “etables” accompanying the article. These breakdown the categories by age and gender and graphically plot the changes in BMI from 1988 to 2010. While each graph is slightly different, they basically all show three trends: the population at normal weight is declining, the population with a BMI of 30 is getting even heavier and the BMI level for 90% of each subgroup is progressively increasing. Bottom line: fewer Americans are at a normal weight and the overweight and obese subgroups are gaining weight.
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