Of Course Obesity Rates Keep Rising!
The current (June 7, 2016) issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association devotes much of its rarefied real estate to the current state of the obesity epidemic in the United States, and the news is not good.
One paper, by Flegal and colleagues, reports on trends in adults over the past decade. Obesity prevalence is now over 35% for men, and over 40% for women. The most recently measured prevalence of Stage 3, or extreme obesity, is now more than one man out of every 20, and nearly one woman out of every ten. All of these figures have risen since 2005, although the changes are only statistically significant in women. Let’s be clear, the trends in men are bad, too- just not as incontrovertibly bad.
