American Obesity Rates Have Peaked: Why Are We No Longer Getting Fatter?

The American population as a whole is no longer getting fatter and fatter. In fact, Americans are no longer the fattest people in the world. That dubious honor now goes to the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru, where 71 percent of the population is obese, and the Cook Islands, also located in the South Pacific, where 63 percent of the population is obese. In fact, the United States ranks eighteenth in obesity rates worldwide, with 33 percent of adults identified as obese, well behind Kuwait (42 percent) and slightly behind Barbados, the Bahamas, Qatar and Egypt (at 34 percent each). Although twice as many American adults and three times as many American children are obese compared to 30 years ago, obesity rates in the US have remained stable since about 2010.

Of course, although there are 17 nations where a greater percentage of the population is obese than in the United States, there are 174 nations where the percentage of obese adults is lower. Moreover, experts don't believe that the stabilizing of obesity rates in the USA is due to better diets and more exercise. Dr David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life Program at Children’s Hospital in Boston says that the plateau might just suggest that “we’ve reached a biological limit” to how obese people could get. When people eat more, he said, at first they gain weight; then a growing share of the calories go “into maintaining and moving around that excess tissue,” he continued, so that “a population doesn’t keep getting heavier and heavier indefinitely.”

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