The rate of severe obesity is about 40 per cent in the US, with women at particularly high risk of severe obesity, the study found.
Obesity is high and holding steady in the US, but the proportion of those with severe obesity especially women has climbed in the past decade, according to new research from the US government.
The US obesity rate is about 40 per cent, according to a 2021-2023 survey of about 6,000 people. Nearly one in 10 of those surveyed reported severe obesity, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found.
Women were nearly twice as likely as men to report severe obesity, a chronic disease linked to a host of health problems.
The overall obesity rate appeared to tick down compared with the 2017-2020 survey, but the change wasn’t considered statistically significant. The numbers are small enough that there’s a mathematical chance they didn’t truly decline.
That means it’s too soon to know whether new treatments for obesity, including blockbuster weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy, Ozempic, and Zepbound, can help ease the epidemic, according to Dr Samuel Emmerich, the CDC public health officer who led the latest study.
Not clear why severe obesity rates are going up
“Seeing increases in severe obesity is even more alarming because that’s the level of obesity that’s most highly associated with some of the highest levels of cardiovascular disease and diabetes and lower quality of life,” said Solveig Cunningham, an Emory University global health professor who specialises in obesity.
Cunningham, who was not involved in the new study, said it’s not clear why rates of severe obesity are going up, or why they were higher among women. Factors could include the effects of hormones, the impact of childbearing or other causes that require further study, she said.
The increasing prevalence of obesity in the US can be “really discouraging,” Goodman said.
But, she added, recent emphasis on understanding obesity as a metabolic disease and new interventions, such as the new class of weight-loss drugs, gives her hope.
The key is preventing obesity in the first place, starting in early childhood, Cunningham said. But even when people develop obesity, preventing additional weight gain should be the goal.
“It’s really hard to get obesity to reverse at the individual level and at the population level,” Cunningham said. “I guess it’s not surprising that we’re not seeing downward shifts in the prevalence of obesity”.