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Obesity could affect 260M Americans by 2050, study warns

By Chris Williams
Published  November 18, 2024 1:26pm EST
Health
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The Brief

    • By 2050, 260M Americans, including 43.1M children, are projected to be overweight or obese, with southern states facing the highest prevalence.
    • Obesity rates in the U.S. have remained steady at 40%, but severe obesity has risen from 8% to nearly 10% over the last decade.
    • Researchers urge policies to address obesity's growing health and economic burden, which has escalated since the 1990s.

A new study projects that more than nearly 260 million Americans will be overweight or obese by 2050.   

The study was published in the medical journal The Lancet, which released the findings last week. 

Researchers said by 2050, the total number of children and adolescents with overweight and obesity will reach 43.1 million. They also believe that the total number of adults with overweight and obesity will reach 213 million by 2050. 

The study also said in most states, one in three adolescents and two in three adults are projected to battle obesity. They noted that southern states such as Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Kentucky could have a higher prevalence of obesity. Colorado and Utah could see the highest percentage change in obese adults from 2021, according to researchers. 

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"Over the past several decades, the overweight and obesity epidemic in the USA has resulted in a significant health and economic burden," the study's authors said. 

(Photo by PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

Researchers said they analyzed self-reported and measured data from more than 130 sources. They analyzed data including body mass index, or BMI. They also examined historical trends of overweight and obesity from 1990 to 2021. 

Results showed that in 2201, 15.1 million children and young adolescents were overweight, 21.4 million older adolescents were overweight, and 172 million adults were overweight.  

The purpose of this story was to motivate the country to come up with policies to combat obesity, researchers said. They believe having more Americans overweight will burden and escalate economic costs. 

Obesity on the rise

The U.S. obesity rate is about 40%, according to a 2021-2023 survey of about 6,000 people. Nearly 1 in 10 of those surveyed reported severe obesity, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. Women were nearly twice as likely as men to report severe obesity.

RELATED: Severe obesity increasing in young US children, study finds

The overall obesity rate appeared to tick down vs. the 2017-2020 survey, but the change wasn’t considered statistically significant; the numbers are small enough that there’s mathematical chance they didn’t truly decline.

Most telling though, the results that show that the overall obesity rate in the U.S. has not changed significantly in a decade, even as the rate of severe obesity climbed from nearly 8% in the 2013-2014 survey to nearly 10% in the most recent one. Before that, obesity had increased rapidly in the U.S. since the 1990s, federal surveys showed.

The Source

  • The Associated Press contributed to this story. The information in this story came from the medical journal, The Lancet. This story was reported from Los Angeles.