Congratulations, America! You’ve stopped getting fatter!
Well, most Americans have. Obesity rates crept up in six states last year but held steady in the other 44 plus the District of Columbia, according to a new report. That showing was good enough to prompt the authors of the report to change its name from “F as in Fat” to “The State of Obesity: Better Policies for a Healthier America.”
“We believe the F no longer stands for ‘failure,’ ” Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Jeffrey Levi, executive director of the Trust for America’s Health, wrote in a letter introducing the report.
Back in 2005, 49 out of 50 states saw year-over-year increases in their rates of obesity, defined as a body mass index above 30. In 2013, only Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, New Jersey, Tennessee and Wyoming were in that category, according to the report.
Perhaps the most heartening trend was that childhood obesity rates stabilized nationwide. Nearly 17 percent of children and young adults between the ages of 2 and 19 were obese as of mid-2012, and another 14 percent were overweight, the report says.
Obesity rates have actually declined for some of the youngest Americans. Among the 40 states that collect BMI data on low-income children between the ages of 2 and 5, 18 recorded declines in their obesity rates between 2008 and 2011, while only three states saw rates go up.
These figures are encouraging to public health experts because the easiest way to fight obesity is to prevent people from gaining too much weight in the first place.
For the first time, a state has passed the 35 percent mark for adult obesity. And it happened with not one, but two: Mississippi and West Virginia are tied, with 35.1 percent of their adult population reporting a BMI above 30.
Rounding out the 10 most obese states were Arkansas (34.6 percent), Tennessee (33.7 percent), Kentucky (33.2 percent) Louisiana (33.1 percent), Oklahoma (32.5 percent), Alabama (32.4 percent), Indiana (31.8 percent) and South Carolina (31.7 percent).
At the other end of the spectrum, the places with the lowest obesity rates were Colorado (21.3 percent), Hawaii (21.8 percent), the District of Columbia (22.9 percent), Massachusetts (23.6 percent), California and Utah (24.1 percent for both), Montana (24.6 percent), Vermont (24.7 percent), Connecticut (25 percent) and New York (25.4 percent).
Similarly, among adults who were at least 26 in 2012, 35 percent of those who didn’t finish high school were obese, compared with 22 percent who finished college, including a technical college.
