Land of Plenty Has Too Many Pounds
When our ancestors hailed the United States as the “Land of Plenty,” it’s hardly likely they meant plenty of pounds. With the obesity epidemic spreading from sea to shining sea, however, the one thing Americans do seem to have plenty of is excess weight.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducts an annual survey, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, for BRFSS, a state-by-state telephone survey of Americans age 18 and older. The most recent survey involved more than 350,000 adults, making it the largest telephone survey on health matters in the entire world.
The number of American adults saying they are obese rose almost 2% from 2005 to 2007, according to the BRFSS survey. In spite of the CDC’s Healthy People 2010 program, the goal of which is to reduce the rate of obesity to 15% or less nationwide, 25.6% of survey respondents say they are obese. In 2005, only 23.9% of the survey’s respondents claimed obesity.
Body mass index, or BMI, is the measure used to determine healthy weight, with a BMI of 30 or higher representing obesity. To determine BMI, height and weight are calculated.
The South has the biggest problem with obesity, where 27% of the population claims to be obese. Next in line is the Midwest, with an obesity rate of 25.3%, followed by 23.3% in the Northeast, and 22.1% in the West.
Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee are the three heaviest states. Colorado comes closest to meeting the Healthy People 2010 goal, where only 18.7% of the survey respondents said they were obese.
Of men and women between the ages of 19 and 29, 19.1% of them reported obesity but Americans seem to get heavier as they get older. Of the men surveyed between the ages of 50 and 59, 31.7% reported obesity while 30.2% of the women in this age group did so.
Carrying excess weight puts a person at very high risk of developing life-threatening medical conditions, including heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. In addition to the personal distress these conditions cause, they also produce a costly burden to individual states and the nation as a whole, according to Deb Galuska, associate director of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, a division of the CDC.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
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[...] Land of Plenty Has Too Many Pounds - Medheadlines.comWhen our ancestors hailed the United States as the “Land of Plenty,” it’s hardly likely they meant plenty of pounds. With the obesity epidemic spreading from sea to shining sea, however, the one thing Americans do seem to have plenty of is [...]
Obesity per se is not the problem. The real issue is the health and mortality consequences which follow from obesity. In November Harvard Medical School studied obese mice. The team of researchers gave one group biotivia transmax resveratrol extract, a commercial version of a compound found in red wine, and the other a placebo. The group receiving transmax resveratrol lived 31% longer and did not contract the normal diseases of aging such as diabetes, tumors, and cardiac diseases. Their endurance and energy levels also improved dramatically. Resveratrol is clearly no substitute for a good diet, exercise and a healthy lifestyle but it may augment all of these and extend the potential for ultimate life span. We need to first concentrate of the prevention of the disease of obesity and treat the excess weight as a separate issue. This approach will result in a reduction of suffering and huge health care cost savings.