Americans Weigh in Over Time
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 4th ed., 1984)
Americans in 2004 are fatter than ever, the heaviest since the government started tracking patterns of body weight for the U.S. adult population in the first half of the twentieth century. An estimated 100 million adults weigh more than is considered healthy, and of this group, more than forty-four million are considered obese. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and U.S. Surgeon General, overweight and obesity afflict more than two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans and constitute a public health problem of epic and epidemic proportions. (An epidemic is not a specific number of cases of a disease or condition; an epidemic exists when the number of cases exceeds that expected based on past experience for a given population.) Despite billions of dollars spent on diet programs, overweight and obesity are widespread and increasingly prevalent throughout the United States.
Although Americans' body weights had been incrementally increasing during the last century, overweight and obesity skyrocketed between 1980 and 2000. The CDC reports that during that time obesity among adults more than doubled, and obesity among adolescents tripled.
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