By Nicole Ostrow
Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) — The number of U.S. adults and children who are considered obese may have leveled off over the past decade particularly among women, even if millions of Americans are still overweight, researchers found.
About 36 percent of women were obese in 2008, little changed from 1999, according to a study published today by the Journal of the American Medical Association. About 32 percent of men were classified as obese in 2008, compared with 28 percent in 1999, with most of the increase occurring in the early part of the decade.
The number of people who are obese has more than doubled in the past 30 years to 72 million, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People who are overweight or obese have a greater risk of diabetes, heart attacks and strokes, said the Atlanta-based CDC.
“We may have halted the progress of the obesity epidemic,” said William Dietz, director of the CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, in a telephone interview yesterday. “We haven’t reversed it.”
“The challenge here is what do we need to implement to drive these numbers the other way,” said Dietz, who was not involved in the study.
Obesity for adults is defined as having a body mass index greater than 30, which is equivalent to about 186 pounds for a person who is 5 feet, 6 inches tall. The index represents weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared.
Health Impact
The surge in obesity has undermined progress made in other public health areas such as heart disease, according to a study presented in November by University of Texas researchers in November. The advances include cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, introduced in the late 1980s, and programs that the CDC said have cut smoking rates to 21 percent in 2008 from 37 percent in 1970.
Companies such as Orexigen Therapeutics Inc. of La Jolla, California, Vivus Inc. of Mountain View, California, and San Diego-based Arena Pharmaceuticals Inc. are developing weight loss drugs. Orexigen has said it plans to seek U.S. approval of its Contrave medicine in the first half of 2010. In December, Arena Pharmaceuticals submitted an application for its obesity drug lorcaserin and Vivus submitted an application for its obesity treatment Qnexa. Japanese-based Shionogi & Co. is also developing a weight loss drug.
Adults and Children
The researchers analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2007 and 2008 for two studies published today, one on adults and another on children. In the adult study, height and weight measurements were looked at from 5,555 men and women ages 20 and older. In the children’s study, heights and weights were analyzed on 3,281 children ages two through 19 and 719 infants and toddlers from birth through two years old.
While obesity was considered to be a body mass index of more than 30, overweight for adults was defined as having a BMI of 25 to 30.
The researchers in the adult study found that overall, 33.8 percent of Americans were obese in 2007-2008, while 68 percent were considered either overweight or obese. Somewhat more men, about 72 percent, were classified as either overweight or obese compared with about 64 percent of women, the study showed.
“It appears that the rapid increases we saw in the 1980s and the 1990s are at the very least slowing down,” said Cynthia Ogden, an author on both studies and an epidemiologist at the CDC, in a Jan. 12 telephone interview. “The prevalence still remains very high and obesity still continues to be a significant health concern in the U.S. We still have work to do.”
Children and Teens
In the study on children, the researchers found that about 32 percent of children ages 2 to 19 were at risk for being overweight or obese, similar to the findings reported in 2008 by the CDC. About 17 percent of the children were considered obese and almost 12 percent were considered the heaviest kids.
The heaviest boys ages six to 19 continued to gain weight over the decade, the only children’s group that didn’t level off during the study period, said Ogden, who was lead author on the children’s study.
J. Michael Gaziano, a preventive cardiologist at the Veterans Administration Boston Health Care System and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said today’s findings are “silver linings to the cloud, but the cloud is still large.”
There isn’t a consensus on how to manage and lose weight, and the government needs to invest more heavily in developing strategies that help people lose weight over the long term, said Gaziano, who wrote an editorial accompanying the studies in the journal.
Dietz, the CDC official, said the agency has targeted six behaviors to help reduce obesity: physical activity, breast feeding, fruit and vegetable intake, reduction in TV time, reduction in high-calorie foods and reduction in sweetened beverage intake. The agency is also working with states to combat the obesity epidemic, according to its Web site.
The studies were sponsored by CDC.
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–With assistance from Kanoko Matsuyama in Tokyo. Editors: Donna Alvarado, Angela Zimm
To contact the reporter on this story: Nicole Ostrow in New York at +1-646-416-6547 or nostrow1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at +1-212-617-2563 or rgale5@bloomberg.net