May 25, 2016 – Americans are still getting fatter. According to a new report by the CDC, the big negative is that the rate of obesity in the United States is continuing its upward climb. In 2015, 30.4% of Americans 20 and older said they were obese, up from 29.6% in 2014.
Although the 2015 rate is not significantly higher than the previous year’s, it represents a continuation of a trend that has been going on since at least 1997, when researchers began using the current survey and when only 19.4% of Americans said they were obese.
CDC researchers found that rates of obesity were higher among blacks than Hispanic and white adults. 45% of black women reported that they were obese, compared with 32.6% of Hispanic women and 27.2% of white women. Similarly, 35.1% of black men said they were obese, compared with 32% and 30.2% of Hispanic and white men, respectively.
Adults between the ages of 40 and 59 bore the highest burden of obesity. In this age group, 34.6% of people said they were obese, compared with 26.5% of adults 20 to 39 years old and 30.1% of adults 60 and older.
The other discouraging finding from the report is that the number of Americans who said they had been diagnosed with diabetes continued to rise. Among people 18 and older, 9.5% said they had diabetes in 2015, compared with 9.1% in 2014.
Marketdata Commentary
No big surprise here. Just look around you when you go to a shopping mall or other public place. One thing still stands out–where are the special weight loss programs for all those overweight Black and Hispanic women? Seems like a huge untapped market to us.