News

Posted on July 11, 2011

Adult Obesity Rates Up in Sixteen States, Report Finds

Adult obesity rates rose in sixteen states over the last year and have doubled or nearly doubled in seventeen states since 1995, a new report from Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation finds.

The report, F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America's Future 2011 (124 pages, PDF), found that twelve states have adult obesity rates above 30 percent, compared with only one state four years ago. For the seventh straight year, Mississippi had the highest rate, at 34.4 percent. The report also found that the epidemic continues to be most severe in the South, which includes nine of the ten states with the highest rates; that adult obesity rates for African Americans and Latinos were higher than for whites in nearly every state, with rates exceeding 40 percent for African Americans in fourteen states; that more than 33 percent of adults earning less than $15,000 a year were obese, compared with 24.6 percent of those earning at least $50,000; and that nearly 33 percent of adults without a high school diploma were obese, compared with 21.5 percent of those with a college degree.

In addition, the report examined trends since twenty years ago, when no state had an adult obesity rate above 15 percent. According to the latest data, thirty-eight states posted rates above 25 percent and only one state had a rate below 20 percent. Since 1995, rates have doubled in seven states and increased by 90 percent in ten others, with the incidence of obesity rising fastest in Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee and slowest in Washington, D.C., Colorado, and Connecticut. The report also analyzes trends in obesity rates among youth between the ages of 10 and 17 and found that more than one-third are either obese (16.4 percent) or overweight (18.2 percent).

"Today, the state with the lowest obesity rate would have had the highest rate in 1995," said TFAH executive director Jeffrey Levi. "There was a clear tipping point in our national weight gain over the last twenty years, and we can't afford to ignore the impact obesity has on our health and corresponding healthcare spending."