The ever-increasing obesity rates actually slowed to a stop this year in all but one state.
"We honestly believe real and lasting progress is being made in the nation's effort to turn back the obesity epidemic," Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), and Jeffrey Levi, PhD, executive director of the Trust for America's Health (TFAH), wrote in a report, MedPage Today reported.
While national obesity rates seem to be at a stand-still for now, they are still considerably high. Forty-one states have obesity rated of about 25 percent, 14 are over 30.
Arkansas was the only state that saw an increase this year, and it was a considerable one. Arkansas' obesity rate leapt from 30.9 percent to 34.5.
In 1990 all states had obesity rates of 20 percent or lower, in 1980 it was only 15 percent.
"If we fail to reverse our nation's obesity epidemic, the current generation of young people may be the first in American history to live sicker and die younger than their parents' generation," Lavizzo-Mourey and Levi said.
Researchers have wondered if obesity rates have simply "hit the ceiling."
"A leveling off of obesity rates would be inevitable when we hit the ceiling. The question is: Is the ceiling at or below 100 percent?" David Katz, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, told Med Page Today "It may be that just as some fixed percentage is resistant to everything we do to discourage smoking, a small but fixed percentage is resistant to everything modern culture does to discourage obesity. Maybe we are pushing up against that threshold."
There has been a national effort to reduce widespread obesity. Philadelphia and New York have both made the war on obesity a priority.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report that claimed obesity rates in low-income children had dropped in various states. Other states have reported an overall drop in childhood obesity, MedPage Today reported.
"We must ensure that policies at every level support healthy choices, and we must focus investments on prevention," George Blackburn MD, PhD, of the Harvard Medical School division of nutrition, told MedPage Today. The ever-increasing obesity rates actually slowed to a stop this year in all but one state.
