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 In addition, severe obesity - and the serious health problems and
extra healthcare costs associated with it - will disproportionately
affect women, low-income adults, non-Hispanic black adults and
states bordering the lower half of the Mississippi River.
The study projects from past trends, extending them to a
state-by-state level and adjusting for the fact that people who
respond to surveys on the obesity question often underestimate their
weight and overestimate their height, according to chief author
Zachary Ward, a PhD candidate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of
Public Health in Boston.
"Obesity is getting worse in every state and especially concerning
is severe obesity, which used to be pretty rare and now will be the
most common category for a lot of states and subgroups across the
country," he told Reuters Health in a telephone interview.
A person with a body-mass index (BMI, a measure of weight relative
to height) of 30 or above is considered obese. Having a BMI at or
above 35 is regarded as severe obesity.
The average adult male in the U.S. who stands at 5' 9" is obese if
he weighs more than 202 pounds and severely obese at more than 236
pounds. The comparable thresholds for obesity and severe obesity for
the average U.S. female, at 5' 4", are 174 and 203 pounds. Many
online BMI calculators are available, including one from the
National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (here: https://bit.ly/2PySiOB).
The Ward study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine,
used more than 20 years of data from 6.3 million adults to project
into 2030.
The team forecasts that rates of severe obesity will be particularly
pronounced among women (with a rate of 27.6%) and among both
non-Hispanic black adults and low-income adults (at rates of 31.7%
each).
The state with the highest rate of obesity, the researchers
projected, will be Oklahoma, at 58.4%, with Arkansas, Alabama and
Mississippi all tied for second place at 58.2%.
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The state with the lowest obesity rate will be Colorado, which "has
always been one of the best states," Ward said. "People do a lot of
outdoors stuff there. Income may be higher. Also a lot of people
live at a higher elevation, and there may be something about having
to take a little extra energy to do everything at a higher altitude"
that keeps weights lower, he noted.
Nonetheless, 38.2% of residents there are expected to be obese by
2030. California and Massachusetts will rank 2nd and 3rd in having
the lowest percentage.
The state with the highest rate of severe obesity, the researchers
project, will be Arkansas, at 29.6%, with Oklahoma, West Virginia
and Louisiana coming in just behind.
Colorado will have the lowest rate in this category at 14.3%.
California, Hawaii and New York will rank 2nd, 3rd and 4th in having
the lowest proportion of severely obese people by 2030, the
researchers calculate.
The margin of error in the estimates is about plus or minus 2
percentage points.
"We hope this will help state and city policymakers see where
they're heading because some states are talking about introducing
things like a sugar-sweetened beverage tax" to try to address the
obesity problem, and the new data may assist in such decisions, Ward
said.
The study didn't look at the reasons behind the trends, but "income
is a big driver. Age is a big driver. So, where there's more young
people in a state, obesity prevalence tends to be lower because
people tend to gain weight as they age," Ward said.
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2Z2Vkh8 The New England Journal of Medicine,
online December 18, 2019.
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