Seventy-five percent of American Adults Will Be Overweight by 2015, Study Finds

Note from Connie: As if it wasn't bad enough! By the year 2015, a whopping 75% of American adults and nearly a quarter of American kids will be overweight or obese, according to an alarming study from researchers at the Center for Human Nutrition at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Jennifer Moore brings you more info.

The research team drew this frightening conclusion through a meta-analysis of four national surveys and 20 studies. They discovered that the proportion of overweight or obese people has grown by an average of 0.3 to 0.8 percentage points since the 1960s. 

Back then, only 13% of the population was obese. In 2004, that number had shot up to 32%, and by 2015, it will have skyrocketed to 41%, these researchers predict.

Lead researcher Youfa Wang, M.D., Ph.D. rightly sounds alarmed about this trend.

"Obesity is a public health crisis," Dr. Wang said in a press release from the Center for Human Nutrition.

Study co-author May A. Beydoun, a Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellow in the School of Public Health's Department of International Health, sounds an even more ominous note.

She says that if nothing is done to slow down the rate of obesity, "it will soon become the leading preventable cause of death in the United States."

Obesity puts a person at risk of serious, potentially life-threatening ailments like diabetes and heart disease. To think that 41% of people will soon be susceptible to such conditions is very troubling, to say the least.

But within Beydoun's words is a glimmer of hope, that being the word "preventable."

While the obesity problem is growing and seems unstoppable, people can improve their chances of not becoming obese by following a diet low in sugar and quickie-carbs and chock-full of fresh fruits, vegetables and high quality carbs and getting regular physical exercise.

Thanks go to NewsTarget.com for alerting us to this eye-opening study, which was recently published in the journal Epidemiologic Reviews.

Jennifer Moore for SUGAR SHOCK! Blog