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2007/07/19, 12:41 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - If people keep gaining weight at the current rate, fat will be the norm by 2015, with 75 percent of U.S. adults overweight and 41 percent obese, U.S. researchers predicted on Wednesday.
A team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore examined 20 studies published in journals and looked at national surveys of weight and behavior for their analysis, published in the journal Epidemiologic Reviews.
"Obesity is a public health crisis. If the rate of obesity and overweight continues at this pace, by 2015, 75 percent of adults and nearly 24 percent of U.S. children and adolescents will be overweight or obese," Dr. Youfa Wang, who led the study, said in a statement.
They defined adult overweight and obesity using a standard medical definition called body mass index. People with a BMI of 25 or above are considered overweight, while those with BMIs of 30 or above are obese and at serious risk of heart disease, diabetes and some cancers.
Studies show that 66 percent of U.S. adults were overweight or obese in 2003 and 2004. An alarming 80 percent of black women aged 40 or over are overweight and 50 percent are obese.
Sixteen percent of U.S. children and adolescents are overweight and 34 percent are at risk of becoming overweight, according to federal government figures.
Every group is steadily getting heavier, Wang said.
"Our analysis showed patterns of obesity or overweight for various groups of Americans," said May Beydoun, who worked on the study.
"Obesity is likely to continue to increase, and if nothing is done, it will soon become the leading preventable cause of death in the United States."
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Michael
Humble, even in Victory.
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2007/07/19, 12:51 PM
So that would mean that overweight would actually be more like average weight so in fact most of us on this site would be more like under weight....right?
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2007/07/19, 03:22 PM
So this means that in 7 years when I'm 37 having my mid life crisis, I'll be looking like a cheese burger to a good percentage of women.
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2007/07/24, 12:50 PM
WOW! Believable, yet Unbelieveable if you know what I mean.
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Bettia
You Get What You Train For!
- Unknown
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2007/07/26, 01:37 PM
How is BMI established. It is my understanding that it doesn't really apply that well to athletes and/or people with a strength training background. My BMI has been same for years, but I have gone from 25% body fat to 15%. I still weight about the same. How can I have the same BMI. This doesn't make sense to me.
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2007/07/26, 01:46 PM
Quote from Wikipedia
"It is meant to be used as a simple means of classifying sedentary (physically inactive) individuals with an average body composition."
Now, I understand where the statistical basis comes from.
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2007/07/27, 12:29 AM
And yet another article on the front page of Seattle Times today...hmmm..why don't people just reverse it and start surrounding themselves with fit, healthy, people and then the whole world will be healthy?
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Fat may be contagious, study finds
By Rob Stein
The Washington Post
Related
Talk about it | Is it "contagious?"
Obesity risk increases ...
If spouse is obese: 37%
If sibling is obese: 40%
If friend is obese: 57% to 171%
WASHINGTON ? Obesity can spread from one person to another somewhat like the flu or a fad, researchers reported Wednesday in a trailblazing study that helps explain one of the nation's biggest public-health problems.
The study, involving more than 12,000 people tracked over 32 years, found that "social networks" play a surprisingly powerful role in determining an individual's chances of gaining weight, transmitting an increased risk of becoming obese from spouse to spouse, from brother to brother and from friend to friend.
The researchers found that when one spouse became obese, the other was 37 percent more likely to do so in the next two to four years, compared with other couples. If a man became obese, his brother's risk rose by 40 percent.
The risk rose even more sharply among friends ? between 57 percent and 171 percent, depending on whether they considered each other mutual friends.
Moreover, the researchers found friends affected friends' risk even when they lived far apart, and the influence cascaded through three degrees of separation before petering out.
"It's almost a cliché to speak of the obesity epidemic as being an epidemic. But we wanted to see if it really did spread from person to person like a fashion or a germ," said Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School, who led the study being published in today's New England Journal of Medicine. "And the answer is yes, it does. We are finding evidence for a kind of social contagion."
Christakis stressed that the researchers are not saying that obesity is literally caused by a virus or some other pathogen, or that factors such as poor diet, lack of exercise or genetics are unimportant.
Rather, the findings suggest that once a person becomes obese, for whatever reason, it may make it more socially acceptable for people close to him or her to gain weight, and that new social norms can proliferate quickly.
"What spreads is an idea. As people around you gain weight, your attitudes about what constitutes an acceptable body size changes, and you might follow suit and emulate that body size," Christakis said.
"It may cross some kind of threshold, and you can see an epidemic take off. Once it starts, it's hard to stop it. It can spread like wildfire."
Other researchers used words such as "brilliant" and "groundbreaking" to describe the work and said it is likely to lead to a flurry of new research.
"This is one of the most exciting studies in medical sociology that I've seen in decades," said Richard Suzman, director of the behavioral- and social-research program at the National Institute on Aging, which funded the study.
The discovery could suggest new tactics for stemming the seemingly inexorable trend of obesity. The findings lend support to treating people in groups or even whole communities, for example. The researchers noted that their study also showed that people who were close to someone who lost weight were more likely to get thinner.
"If these close social environments can promote a disease, they can also promote solutions to disease," said William Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "These same social networks might be used to turn a disease like obesity around."
The proportion of obese Americans has been rising steadily for decades, and more than two-thirds of U.S. adults are now overweight, including one-third who are obese. Obesity boosts the risk for a host of health problems, including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
In King County, more than one in two adults (54 percent) were overweight or obese in 2004. In 1987, 37 percent of the population was overweight or obese.
The new study is the first to explore the influence of social networks ? people connected through family, friendships, neighborhoods or other relationships ? for any chronic condition.
Christakis and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, took advantage of detailed records collected between 1971 and 2003 on 12,067 adults who participated in the well-known Framingham Heart Study.
The researchers were able to construct intricate maps of the social connections among the participants, identifying spouses, siblings, neighbors and both casual and close friends.
Sophisticated statistical analyses revealed distinct groupings of thin and heavy individuals and showed that the clusters could not be explained simply as a matter of similar-sized individuals gravitating toward one another because they already shared lifestyles.
"This is not 'birds of a feather flock together.' It's not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with," Christakis said. "Rather, there is a direct causal relationship."
Some researchers questioned whether the study had fully accounted for other factors.
"People pick friends because they are similar in the way they eat or the way they move," said Barry Popkin, who studies obesity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "It's a nice piece of work but still stops short of being able to deal with causality."
But Christakis said the data showed siblings and spouses had less influence than friends, for example, supporting the idea that the results could not be the outcome of people originally eating the same foods, engaging in the same activities or sharing genes.
And while environmental factors such as living in neighborhoods with a lot of fast-food restaurants probably play a role, the researchers found no effect among neighbors unless they were friends, and being friends had an effect regardless of whether they lived nearby.
That ruled out common surroundings as explanations for the findings, the team said.
"We were stunned to find that people who were hundreds of miles away had just as much impact on a person's weight status as friends who are next door," Fowler said. "This is not due to people eating or exercising together."
The researchers also found one person's weight gain only increased another's risk if the second person considered the first to be a friend. If not, there was no effect. If both considered the other a friend, the effect was magnified.
"This shows that this is a social process that goes on here," Christakis said.
"If it was because you had two people exposed to the same fast-food joint or there was something in the air, then the direction of the friendship should be irrelevant. That fact that it is relevant helps us to exclude spurious or confounding effects."
That was reinforced by the fact that people of the same sex influenced each other the most. In same-sex friendships, an individual was 71 percent more likely to become obese if a friend did. But friends and siblings of opposite genders had no increased risk.
"People are more likely to copy the actions of people they resemble," Christakis said.
The researchers cautioned that people should not sever relationships with friends who gained weight, or stigmatize obese people, noting that close friendships have many positive health effects. But the results do support forming relationships with people who have healthy lifestyles.
Others said the findings should not be interpreted as relieving people of responsibility for watching their weight.
"At the end of the day, an individual still controls what they eat and how they move," said Gary Foster, president-elect of the Obesity Society.
Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company
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Bettia
You Get What You Train For!
- Unknown
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2007/07/31, 12:17 PM
I could fully understand how that works Bettia. Great article. Everyone wants to fit in group wise, it just depends what group your in. It used to be a bad thing to have a big butt about a decade ago too, but now every girl wants a little junk in the trunk now. lol..... I would be interested to see the percentage splits based on gender.
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2007/08/02, 03:50 PM
Yeah that is so true. I got trunk in the trunk that I wish to donate to any one of those girls who want some...LOL!
:)
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Bettia
You Get What You Train For!
- Unknown
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2007/08/02, 03:51 PM
Sometimes I wonder about myself......:surprised:
I meant junk in the TRUNK!
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Bettia
You Get What You Train For!
- Unknown
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2007/08/03, 08:55 PM
"wow you got , jumper cables, blankets, flashlights...thats the good kinda junk to have in your trunk"
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\"The eight laws of learning are explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, and repetition\"
You have to learn to follow, before you can lead.
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