(AXcess News) Houston – A recent study revealed that Americans are getting fatter and that obesity may be the norm by 2015 if something isn’t done about it. The ramifications to society there as a whole are huge with health at the forefront if Americans don’t take control of their diet and exercise regime.
The study predicts that 75 percent of American adults will be overweight with 41 percent of those obese by 2015. But the prediction is based on looking back over the last thirty years in which 0.3 to 0.8 percent per year was the average increase in U.S. population weight gain.
So over time, those pounds are adding up, but over that same period Americans lives have changed dramatically. They’re now more sedentary, their diets have changed significantly with technology advancements and the advent of fastfood restaurants and cook-it-now microwave foods that make it easier to just pop something in to cook and snack on.
Even schools grew to permit more snack-type foods to creep into buildings and a host of sugar-laced drinks to wash it all down with, so it’s no surprise to hear that Americans are overweight and many headed toward obesity.
Youfa Wang, assistant professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health called the situation “alarming.”
The study was conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who found that the level of obesity amongst Americans escalated from 13 percent in the 1960s to 32 percent in 2004.
“We set out to estimate the average annual increase in prevalence as well as the variation between population groups to predict the future situation regarding obesity and overweight among U.S. adults and children,” said Wang.
Wang called it a ‘public health crisis’ saying, “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.”
