Summary
A new Lancet study reveals nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, a sharp rise from just over half in 1990.
Obesity among adults doubled to over 40%, while rates among girls and women aged 15–24 nearly tripled to 29%.
The study highlights significant health risks, including diabetes, heart disease, and shortened life expectancy, alongside projected medical costs of up to $9.1 trillion over the next decade.
Experts stress obesity’s complex causes—genetic, environmental, and social—and call for structural reforms like food subsidies, taxes on sugary drinks, and expanded treatment access.
Maybe…but two things:
If the number of obese people is lower, then what are the people who aren’t mildly overweight? They are healthy weight. So even if the percentage of mildly overweight people stay the same, the day to day comparison is with a bigger group of healthy weight people, so they probably were more recognizably overweight.
Secondly, with less really obese people you wouldn’t get desensitized to seeing fat all the time, which makes mildly overweight people seem more normal. Somebody with a BMI of 26 and about 15lbs overweight would have been more likely to be described as “plump” or “husky” back then. But when crowds are full of people that are 50+ lbs overweight, that 26 BMI seems downright healthy.
This is all speculation. I can’t remember how I perceived overweight vs obese people back in the 80’s.
Well, you may be right. I’m not going to try to divine cultural sentiment from 40 years ago or whatever. I just think the study collapsing a relatively stable category (people who are “overweight”) with people who are obese and morbidly obese kind of hides the news. Sure, it makes for a splashier headline “75%!!” But the increase in obesity and morbid obesity is actually more dramatic when the “overweight” category is taken out of the focus.