Americans Not Gaining In Fat Fight
Americans have gotten relentlessly fatter over the past two decades, despite a nationwide obsession with dieting and urgent repeated warnings from medical experts, the latest large-scale federal survey has found.
The segment of U.S. children and adolescents classified as overweight increased by 6 percent from 1980 to 1994, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in a report published today ; incidence among adults grew by 9 percent in the same period.
The latest figures indicate that, thanks to overeating and pandemic sloth, 35 percent of the country’s adults now weigh dangerously more than they should, along with 14 percent of children aged 6 to 11 and 12 percent of adolescents aged 12 to 17. This is the heaviest the nation has been since the government began compiling statistics in the 1960s.
“Americans need to do better in choosing a healthy diet and a sensible plan of physical activity,” Health and Human Services Secretary Donna E. Shalala said in a statement.
Many experts believe that it would take relatively modest modifications in most people’s behaviors to slow the pudge boom. “It’s really important for people not to think that they have to go on strict diets or join gyms,” said epidemiologist Cynthia Ogden of CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, which produced the study. Last July the Surgeon General issued a report recommending 30 minutes of moderate physical activity - such as walking or gardening - per day. “Basically, it’s just moving around,” Ogden said.
Any improvement, researchers have emphasized for years, would have a substantial impact on public health because being overweight is associated with increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, respiratory disorders and some cancers, among other hazards. Obesity and related conditions contribute to an estimated 300,000 deaths per year, and are regarded as the second leading preventable cause of death after smoking.
They are also expensive. The “economic costs of obesity in the United States from excess medical expenses and loss of income are reported to exceed $68 billion” every year, according to the National Task Force on the Prevention and Treatment of Obesity. And that figure, they wrote a few weeks ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “does not include the more than $30 billion spent yearly on diet foods, products and programs.”
Across the board, the report suggests, Americans simply have been getting too much chow and too little exercise. Coincidently, modern life does not oblige them to walk as much or use their muscles as hard as they did even a couple of decades ago. “Changes that result in decreased energy expenditures,” the authors write, “may have occurred in … transportation patterns, household work and time spent in inactivity (e.g., watching television and playing electronic games).”
xxxx BMI formula How to compute your body mass index: Compute height into inches and divide by 39.4 to convert to meters. For example: 5 feet 8 inches equals 68 inches, and 68 inches divided by 39.4 equals 1.7 meters. Square that number by multiplying it by itself: 1.7 times 1.7 equals 2.9 meters squared. Divide weight by 2.2 to convert to kilograms: 140 pounds divided by 2.2 equals 64 kilograms. Divide the kilograms by the height in meters squared: 64 kilograms divided by 2.9 meters squared equals a body mass index of 22. A 5-foot-8 woman would be overweight if her body mass index were 27.3 or above. The standard for a man of the same height is 27.8.