Wednesday, March 08, 2017

As obesity keeps rising, more Americans are just giving up

The L.A. Times reports:
The proportion of American adults who were either overweight or obese has been growing steadily for decades, rising from about 53% a generation ago to roughly 66% more recently.

But the share of these adults who had gone on a diet dropped during the same period, researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

The study relied on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an ongoing project of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the first survey period, between 1988 and 1994, about 56% of overweight or obese adults reported they had tried to lose weight in the last year. By the last survey period, between 2009 and 2014, the proportion of overweight or obese respondents reporting recent weight-loss attempts had declined to about 49%.

That trend was considered statistically significant in white women and white men. But it was most pronounced among African American women, 55% of whom were overweight or obese in the final years of the study.

In the first survey period, about 66% of black women who were overweight or obese said they had tried to lose weight in the last 12 months. By the last period, 55% of overweight or obese black women said they had made weight-loss efforts.

The authors of the new report, a team from Georgia Southern University’s College of Public Health, offered a relatively simple explanation for this phenomenon, writing that “socially acceptable body weight is increasing.”
If only we had market based health insurance...