Overweight percentage

The minimum average energy requirement for a sedentary adult to survive is around 2,000 kcal a day, which rises to 4,000 or more if the person is engaged in strenuous labor much of the day. Only a very small percentage of the U.S. population is involved in strenuous labor, yet much of the population consumes over 4,000 calorics each day, resulting in an America that is 50 percent overweight and 20 percent obese. 

How can this be Just look at the labels on products that line the shelves of your local supermarket low fat, zero fat, reduced fat, pseudofat. You would think we d all be withering away. Yet as fat consumption decreases, the percentage of overweight people rises. Mysterious Not really. Fat consumption may have gone down, but calorie intake has zoomed upwards. And, contrary to some of the popular rhetoric, calories do count. 

Prospective study. Prevalence of overweight and obesity, body fat percentage, and central obesity were comparable to controls, however higher than ideal... 

The Weight Epidemic. Worldwide, 1 billion people are overweight, and 300 million of these people are obese. In the United States, the percentage of obesity remained relatively stable from 1960 to 1980. Since then, however, the prevalence of obesity has more than doubled. Nearly 70 percent of American are considered overweight, and about 33 percent are obese. 

In a prospective study, fasting serum and anthropometric measures were obtained from 45 patients with first-episode psychosis and 41 healthy adults of similar age, ethnicity, and sex [32 f. At baseline, the distributions of cardiovascular risk markers were similar and the percentages of young patients with first-episode psychosis and healthy controls who were overweight/obese, dyslipidemic, hyperglycemic, and hyperinsulinemic did not differ. At 24 weeks, compared with baseline, 16 of the patients with psychosis who continued to take the same antipsychotic medication had statistically significant increases in BMl, glucose, insulin, cholesterol, leptin, and E-selectin, and a reduction in adiponectin. 

Fig. A-7. Percentages of younger and older adults who ransider themselves to be overweight. (Adapted from Social Indicators III, U.S. Dept, of Commerce, Chart 2/23)...

---