Obesity Rates In US Adults Declined For The First Time In Over A Decade
Research found that obesity rates in US adults dipped last year for the first time in more than a decade. Health experts are seeing and predicting a continuous downward trend, according to NBC, and partly credit the decline to the rise in weight loss drug-use such as Ozempic.
The research was published last week in the journal JAMA Health Forum. The publication showed that the most significant decreases occurred in the South among women and adults aged 66 to 75.
The study specifically looked at body mass index (BMI) measurements from more than 16.7 million adults throughout various regions, ages, sexes, races, and ethnicities from 2013 through 2023. BMI measurements are a standard way in which healthcare providers estimate obesity in relation to weight and height.
According to NBC News, adult obesity rates in the US decreased from 46% to 45.6% between 2022 and 2023. Benjamin Rader, author of the study and computational epidemiologist, said that the published results were “not uniform across demographics and geographic regions.”
“In the U.S. overall, obesity was on the decline, led by the South, but in some regions that wasn’t the case. We also saw large drops among Black Americans, but we saw increases in obesity among Asian Americans,” he stated.
Rader also explained that the decline in obesity in the South aligns with the increase in weight loss drugs. The South showed the “highest observed per-capita uptake of weight loss drugs based on the researchers’ analysis of insurance claims,” Denise Chow and Akshay Syal, M.D wrote for NBC.
Dr. Michael Weintraub said the “results were in line with recent data from the CDC that showed a slight downtick in obesity prevalence among adults in the U.S. in the 2021-2023 period, as compared with the years from 2017 to 2020.”
“I find the data exciting, and with the prospect that we could be at the precipice of a shift in this obesity epidemic. But I hesitate to call this down-trending value in 2023 yet a trend,” he said.
“We know these [weight loss] medications are extremely effective, but we need a couple more years to see if this is truly a trend or if it’s just a little blip and things will go back to where they were, or if it will get even worse,” said Dr. Tannaz Moin, an endocrinologist and associate professor of medicine.
Moin also explained that she was surprised to see such a drop in BMI among older people.
“That isn’t the group that I would necessarily think to be the highest users of GLP-1 drugs because many would be in the Medicare age range,” she said.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
