Contents of Obesity trends slides

Lecture Notes

So what did you see when you looked at all those maps? Clearly our country's becoming more and more obese, but what else did you see? What did you notice?

I'll cover a few points here that you should note. The first is that remember that these graphs are only indicating the changes in obesity, not in people who are overweight, and we'll define the difference between those two, but essentially obesity is a greater level of being overweight. So it's just a higher degree of being overweight, and so this map does not even capture the people in our country who are simply overweight.

You probably also noticed regional differences. So, the South and the Southeast, in particular, seems to change before the other areas of the country. And I want you to think about what some possible reasons or influences on these changes might be. It certainly could have to do with the type of food that is typically eaten in these situations or these locations in the country, maybe the cultural beliefs or practices, but what else can you think of?

Another point to note is that we have an obesity epidemic in this country. Obesity rates have changed very quickly. You looked at time-at how much they've changed since 1985, which seems like a long time ago, but really in the grand picture it's not that long ago. And so we've seen these rapid increases in obesity. And if you click on the obesity epidemic bullet point here, I want you to watch a video that was produced by the CDC. It talks about this epidemic. And in the video they talk about childhood obesity as well, and so the maps that you saw were only for adults in the United States, not for children. But, unfortunately, we're seeing these same problems in children.

As you saw in the video, if you just watched it, about one in six children are now obese, and about one in three young people, which is ages 6 to 19, are at risk of becoming overweight or obese. And because of this we're seeing health problems, like type 2 diabetes, in children that we only used to see in adults. So clearly we have a problem with obesity and overweight trends in this country, and we'll cover some more of these topics as we go through the slides here today.