Showing posts with label Overweight Solutions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Overweight Solutions. Show all posts
Experts are saying the obesity rate in the United States will eventually “top out” at 42%, up 8% from a 2007 prediction of 34%.
Common risks of obesity include type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, and stroke.
Writing in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Computational Biology, researchers expect the number of obese people in the United States to climb to 42% over the next 40 years.
In the study, a mathematical model was applied to four decades of data from the Framingham study; a long term study analyzing the health and habits of a town in Massachusetts.
The researchers say the friends you keep may explain the continued increase in obesity; an American has an additional 0.5% chance of becoming obese with each obese social contact, i.e. friend, they make per year.
Obesity and the desire to lose weight have created a huge weight-loss market in the United States. In 2003, a report claimed Americans spend between $40 and $100 billion on diet products every year.
According to a World Health Organization estimate, in 2007, 400 million adults were obese worldwide.
Rich people in developing countries are bearing the heaviest brunt of the obesity epidemic, suggests a new study.
In 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 1.6 billion adults, ages 15 and older, were overweight and at least 400 million adults were obese.
Writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Harvard researchers found developing nations’ wealthy citizens were more likely to be obese than poor people, which is in stark contrast to U.S. trends, where lower income individuals tend to be fatter.
The WHO projects that by 2015, approximately 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and over 700 million adults will be obese.
For the study, researchers identified trends in the weights of more than half a million women across 54 developing countries between 1994 and 2008 and found people ranking in the top 25% of the population based on wealth had more than double the risk of being overweight, compared to the bottom 25%.
Researchers speculate that food is cheaper and easier for wealthy populations to afford and more upscale neighborhoods also have more restaurants.
But despite the obesity issues, the scientists found a significant portion of the population still suffered from being underweight.
