NEW YORK — Obesity is still rising among American adults despite more than a decade of public-awareness campaigns and other efforts to get people to watch their weight. And women have overtaken men in the obese category, government research shows.
For the past several years, experts said they thought the nation’s alarming, decadeslong rise in obesity had leveled off. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday that the obesity rate has climbed to nearly 38 percent of adults, up from 32 percent about a decade earlier.
“This is a striking finding” and suggests that a situation is getting worse, said Dr. William Dietz of George Washington University.
But the University of North Carolina’s Barry Popkin urged caution, saying the participants selected may not have been representative of the nation as a whole.
Experts said they had no explanation for why the obesity rate may be rising.
The CDC report, based primarily on a survey conducted in 2013-14, also found a tipping of the scales toward women. Obesity rates for men and women had been roughly the same for about a decade. But in the new report, the rate was significantly higher for women, at 38 percent, compared with 34 percent for men.
Obesity — not merely overweight, but seriously overweight — is considered one of the nation’s leading public health problems. Until the early 1980s, only about 1 in 6 adults were obese, but the rate climbed dramatically until it hit about 1 in 3 around a decade ago.
The new figures come from a regular government survey that involves not only interviewing people about but weighing them, making the survey the gold standard for measuring the nation’s waistline.
However, it has about 5,000 participants each year, far fewer than some other federal surveys that ask about weight. Generally, it can be harder to draw reliable national conclusions from a smaller survey.
The news comes after years of government anti-obesity campaigns to encourage people to eat better and exercise. Soda consumption also has dropped in recent years, and fast-food chains have adopted healthier menu items. New federal rules also have been adopted to remove artificial trans fats from grocery store foods and to require chain restaurants to post calorie counts, though those have not gone into effect yet.
The widening gap between men and women seems to be driven by what’s happening among blacks and Hispanics, said Cynthia Ogden, the CDC study’s lead author. Obesity rates for white men and white women remain very close. But for blacks, the female obesity rate has risen to 57 percent, while the black male rate is 38 percent. The gender gap is wide among Hispanics, too: 46 percent for women, 39 percent for men.
The report also looked at obesity in children but did not see much change. For those ages 2 to 19, the rate has been holding at about 17 percent in the past decade or so. Health officials have been focused on obesity in kids, who are the target of the Let’s Move campaign launched by first lady Michelle Obama in 2010. A CDC report last year noted a decline in obesity among those ages 2 to 5. Their rate had fallen to about 8 percent in the 2011-12 survey from 14 percent a decade earlier.
The new 2013-14 report suggests that the rate for toddlers was holding steady around 9 percent.
The CDC measures obesity by Body Mass Index, a ratio of weight to height. For adults, a BMI of 25 to 29.9 is overweight, and 30 or higher is obese. According to the CDC, a 5-foot-10 man is overweight at 174 pounds and obese at 209 pounds.
