Americans are getting more obese, according to a new analysis from the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis aggregated national US data from 2007-2012 to measure the prevalence of obese and overweight people among American adults older than 25, and they found obesity to be trending upwards across the board. In fact, by their count, there are 65.2 million adult Americans who are overweight, and 67.6 million who are obese, as the Guardian points out.
The percentage of adults who are overweight is similar to what it was in the 1990s, but obesity is increasing.
These measures of people who are overweight and obese come from Americans’ body mass indexes, which are a number assigned based on height and weight. While BMI may not the best individual measure of health and body fat (a person can have a high BMI and be perfectly healthy, or vice versa), it is a good way to measure trends in large populations, says co-author Lin Yang.
“I think what’s important here is there’s clearly no trend of decline in the prevalence of overweight and [obese people],” Yang tells Quartz. She says clinicians should emphasize healthy eating and exercise habits with patients, while governments should work to make cities more walkable and make healthy food more affordable and accessible.