The news broke today of a study that’s got the blogosphere and the media buzzing. The paper, published in the July issue of Obesity, was done by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Using a mathematical model, the authors projected the future prevalence of obesity and the BMI distribution in the U.S., based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study (NHANES) collected from the 1970s through 2004. Their results? If current trends continue, a whopping 86 percent of Americans will be overweight or obese by 2030.
And by 2048, they predict, every adult in America will be overweight or obese.
Ok, let’s take a step back. Obviously, these numbers aren’t the Absolute Truth—they represent linear projections based on specific data sets, and rely heavily on the continuation of certain trends that are likely to change in the future. A similar projection would be that smoking rates will hit absolute zero based on the recent and dramatic declines in smoking.
