Chances are slim to none that the U.S. will meet its public health goal of sharply reducing the number of obese adults by this year, according to federal health officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
While just 13 percent of adults were obese in the early 1960s, more than 30 percent were by 1999. In Healthy People 2010, a series of health objectives published in 2000, the U.S. government set forth the goal of reducing the percentage of obese Americans to 15 percent by 2010.
To investigate trends over the past decade, and determine whether the U.S. had any chance of meeting this objective, Dr. Earl S. Ford and his colleagues from the CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion looked at data on nearly 23,000 people aged 20 and older from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for 1999-2008.
In 1999-2000, the researchers found, 27 percent of men were obese and 39 had abdominal obesity. By 2007-2008, those percentages had risen to 32 percent and 44 percent, respectively. The number of obese women inched up from 33 percent to 35 percent over the same time period, while abdominal obesity prevalence rose from 56 percent to 62 percent.
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Photo by Lucas Jackson, Reuters
