A series of studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, began during the Eisenhower Administration and have been carried out periodically ever since.
According to the first National Health study, which was done in the early nineteensixties, 24.3 percent of American adults were overweight. By the time of the second survey in the early 1970s, the proportion of overweight adults had increased by three-quarters of a percent, and, by the third survey in the late 1970s, it had edged up to 25.4 percent.
During the 1980s, the American gut, instead of expanding very gradually, had ballooned: 33.3 percent of adults now qualified as overweight. In 1994, published findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that in just ten years, Americans had collectively gained more than a billion pounds. "If this was about tuberculosis, it would be called an epidemic," another researcher wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.
During the next decade, Americans kept right on gaining. Men are now on average 17 pounds heavier than they were in the late 1970s, and for women that figure is even higher: 19 pounds. the proportion of overweight children, age 6 to 11, has more than doubled, while the proportion of overweight adolescents, age 12 to 19, has more than tripled.
Something big must have changed in America to cause so many people to gain so much weight so quickly. But what, exactly, is unclear--a mystery batter-dipped in enigma.
