America Wins a Prize! Our Obesity Rates Are Number One!

America holds numerous dubious distinctions, often pertaining to our record high poverty rates or our large number of uninsured. But we just racked up another prize, and this time it's for our waistlines.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group comprised of 33 countries with democratic, market-based economies, found that the U.S. population has the highest percentage of overweight and obese among the countries. Or as they put it, we're the "fattest country in the OECD."

Yay! We're number one! Oh, wait. Boo, hiss ... we're fat. But no real surprise, right? Two-thirds of our population is overweight or obese and our rates have increased steadily since the 1980s for both men and women.  And it's not just us: obesity and overweight rates have climbed for all the countries included in the report. Across the OECD, one in two adults is overweight and one in six is obese. The countries with the highest percentage of obese and overweight (after us of course) are Mexico, New Zealand and Australia. The slimmest nations include Japan, Korea and Switzerland.

The report mixes the good with the not-so-good. On one hand, although child obesity rates in the U.S. are the highest among member countries, they have slowed down, and the rates of overweight boys might even start to decrease -- yay! On the other hand, the report projects that three out of four people in the U.S. will be overweight or obese within the next ten years. Ouch.

Perhaps more enlightening than the statistics is the authors acknowledgement that despite the popular perception that the obesity epidemic has a simple solution (often it's "eat less" or "exercise more" or maybe it's a virus?), the data show it to be much more complicated. It emphasizes a government and private sector approach, including health promotion campaigns, government regulation and counseling for obese people.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that the America's society has become "obesogenic." That is, "characterized by environments that promote increased food intake, nonhealthful foods, and physical inactivity." And it's clear that we may have taken the lead on creating these environments, but globally, more and more countries are starting to look like ours.

It will take more than just public service campaigns to change our cultural environment from an obesogenic one to a salutogenic (that is, health-promoting) one. It will take private sector action (like curbing junk food advertising to kids and reducing portion sizes); government regulation and economic incentives; and interdisciplinary approaches to transportation, the built environment and food production.

Could America take the lead on this and win a prize for setting the trend in curbing obesity rates? Our entire country wants to know.

Photo credit: Tobyotter