Certainly, Americans are packing on weight. Yet a recent study confirms a new revelation: since the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the common American has added 15 more pounds without an increase in height. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics released these statistics and more from 2011-2014. They’re based on a dataset of 19,151 people interviewed at home who received medical examinations.
Children are also part of the trend the survey found. Girls are seven pounds heavier despite a static height; boys have grown an inch but added 13.5 pounds.
Race was also a variable. Black Americans gained the most over the entire spread. Black women put on 22 pounds notwithstanding the same average height. Black men grew roughly one-fifth of an inch but were 18 pounds heavier on average.
“We are not doing nearly enough to control and reverse the obesity epidemic and doing far too much to propagate it. This is another notice of that sad fact,” said Dr. David Katz, who directs the Yale University Prevention Research Center and is president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.
The report indicated men’s average weight in the United States expanded from 181 pounds to 196 pounds between 1988-1994 and 2011-2014, but their average height remained the same at roughly 5 feet, 9 inches. Simultaneously, for women, the average weight of 152 pounds elevated to 169 pounds as height remained steady at under 5 feet, 4 inches.
Anthony Comuzzie, an obesity researcher and scientist with the department of genetics at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio, puts these gains into perspective: “A 15- to 16-pound weight gain is fairly significant and typically would be consistent with a couple of points increase in body mass index.”
Body mass index, commonly known as BMI, designates an individual’s weight into several categories including normal, overweight, and obese based on his or her’s body fat. BMI is calculated by the proportion of one’s height and weight measurements.
The average weight gain according to Comuzzie “means that someone who was on the high end of normal weight would have likely moved into the overweight category, and those at the high end of the overweight category would have likely moved into the obese category.”
Source: CBS News