Maybe the good news about obesity in the United States is that it didn’t get worse in 2012 than it was in 2011.
So reports the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. Data from the agency said that the number of U.S. adults that meet the standards for obesity stood pat at 78 million from 2011 to 2012.
For the first time, the agency included data for U.S. residents who self describe as Asian. This group had the lowest obesity percentage — 10.8 percent — of the various groups studied.
Details from the report include:
- 34.9 percent of adults were obese, a number similar to 2009 to 2010.
- The prevalence of obesity was higher among middle-aged adults (39.5 percent), compared to younger (30.3 percent) or older (35.4 percent) adults.
- The prevalence did not differ between men and women, except in black adults where obesity was higher in women (56.6 percent for women versus 37.1 percent for men).
- Overall, black adults had the highest prevalence of obesity (47.8 percent) and Asian adults had the lowest (10.8 percent), compared to Hispanics (42.5 percent) and white adults (32.6 percent).
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Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
