Obesity rates remain high, but stable in the U.S

More than a third of U.S. adults and 17 percent of kids and teens are obese, rates that haven't changed much in a decade, researchers say.

Only preschool-age children show signs of a turnaround, with their obesity rates nearly halved in the same period, according to a new federal study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"The rapid increase in obesity we saw in the '80s and '90s has definitely slowed," epidemiologist Cynthia Ogden told Reuters Health. "There's some glimmer of hope in the new data in relation to the 2 to 5 year olds."

Ogden, a branch chief at the National Center for Health Statistics in Rockville, Maryland, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is lead author of the new study.

Obesity rates among 2 to 5 year old Americans dropped from 13.9 percent to 8.4 percent between 2003 and 2012, her team reports.

Not all the news on the national state of weight was positive, however.

In the U.S.:

68.8% of adults are overweight or obese; 35.7% are obese.
31.8% of children and adolescents are overweight or obese; 16.9% are obese.
30.4% of low-income preschoolers are overweight or obese.
Disparities exist based on race-ethnicity, gender, age, geographic region, and socioeconomic status.

Though the overall obesity rate across all U.S. age groups has been stable since 2003, women 60 years and older have been growing fatter. Their rate of obesity rose from 31.5 percent to 38 percent over nine years, the study found.

Ogden and her colleagues used the annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys to examine obesity trends in representative samples of Americans between the 2003 - 2004 survey year and 2011 - 2012.

The 5.5 percentage point drop in the obesity rate among 2 to 5 year olds mirrored decreases found among preschoolers in previous studies, the authors write.

A report published last year, for example, found that after doubling over 30 years, the obesity rate among low-income preschool children fell in 19 U.S. states and territories (see Reuters story of August 6, 2013 here: reut.rs/OuyauP).

Nonetheless, more than two-thirds of American adults and nearly one-third of youth aged 2 to 19 years old fell into the overweight or obese categories in 2011 - 2012.

For adults, body mass index (BMI) - a measure of weight relative to height - defines obesity. A BMI above 25 is considered overweight, and BMI over 29.5, which is equivalent to a 5-foot, 4-inch adult weighing 174 pounds, is considered obese.

Obesity rates have more than doubled in adults and children since the 1970’s (National Center for Health Statistics, 2009). While recent estimates suggest that the overall rates of obesity have plateaued or even declined, obesity is widespread and continues to be a leading public health problem in the U.S. (Flegal et al., 2012; Ogden et al., 2012; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2012; Wen et al., 2012). Plus, substantial disparities exist based on demographics (e.g., race-ethnicity, gender), geographic region, and socioeconomic status (SES). See the section on the Relationship Between Poverty and Overweight or Obesity for more information on SES disparities.