United States
The United States has the highest obesity rates in the developed world. This is a long-standing phenomenon: already by 1962, 45% of adult Americans were overweight, and 13% of adult Americans were obese; these numbers were already higher than obesity rates observed in most developed countries as late as 2001-02. From 1980 to 2002, obesity rates have doubled, reaching the current rate of 33% of the adult population.
As of 2007, 33% of men and 36% of women are obese. Rates of obesity vary between social groups, with minorities and low-income individuals more likely to be overweight. The rates are as high as 50% among African American women.
Geography is a major factor. The American South has been described alternatively as "Stroke belt", "Obesity belt", or "Diabetes belt", to reflect the fact that all residents of the region have high incidences of these three conditions, compared to people of the same race/ethnicity elsewhere in the country. The lowest obesity rates of major racial/ethnic groups across 50 states are thought to be among non-Hispanic white residents of Colorado and Hawaii, at around 16%. However, these numbers are based on self-reported height and weight data and likely to be underestimated (the bias is so large that, for example, estimates of obesity that rely on self-reported data arrive at the rate of 22% among non-Hispanic white females, whereas studies that involve direct measurement show that the rate is closer to 34%.)
The prevalence of class III obesity (BMI ≥40) has increased the most dramatically, from 1.3% in the late 1970s, to 2.9% in 1988-94, to 4.7% in 2000, to 5.7% in 2008. Among African American women, its prevalence is estimated to be as high as 14%.
The overall rate of obesity began to plateau in the '00s, but severe obesity and obesity in children continued to rise. In January 2010, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the obesity rate for American women has remained constant over the last decade, with only small rises amongst men and children.
Obesity is one of the leading health issues in US society, resulting in about 300,000 deaths per year in the United States. About 65 percent of Americans are now considered either overweight or obese. According to National Health and Nutrition Examination Study collected between 1970s and 2004, overweight and obesity prevalence have increased steadily among all groups of Americans over the past three decades.
Read more about this topic: Epidemiology Of Obesity, The Americas
Famous quotes related to united states:
“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomac ... and that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)