Melissa Healy reports on a comprehensive state-by-state report titled ‘F as in Fat,’ for the Los Angeles Times:
America continues to get fatter, according to a comprehensive new report on the nation’s weight crisis. Statistics for 2008-2010 show that 16 states are experiencing steep increases in adult obesity, and none has seen a notable downturn in the last four years.
Meanwhile, cases of Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure that health experts have long warned would result from the nation’s broadening girth and sedentary ways are becoming increasingly widespread, according to the report, titled “F as in Fat,” released Thursday.
Even Coloradans, long the nation’s slimmest citizens, are gaining excess pounds. With an obese population of 19.8% — it is the only state with an adult obesity rate below 20% — Colorado remains the caboose on the nation’s huffing, puffing train to fat land.
But in just the last four years, the ranks of the obese even in Colorado have grown 0.7%. Colorado’s hypertension rates have risen significantly as well, to 21.2% of adults.
The report, prepared by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Trust for America’s Health, is their sixth annual state-by-state accounting of obesity.
In the last 15 years, the report said, adult obesity rates have doubled or nearly doubled in 17 states. Two decades ago, not a single state had an obesity rate above 15%. Now all states do.
“When you look at it year by year, the changes are incremental,” said Jeffrey Levi, executive director of the Trust for America’s Health. But if you back up a generation and look at the slow but steady climb of Americans’ weight, he said, “you see how we got into this problem.”…
[continues in the Los Angeles Times]
