More than one in five American adults in every U.S. state are obese, with rates rising in many states, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Sept. 12. According to our analysis, however, the national average obesity rate has fallen slightly, from 33.9% in 2022 to 33.6% last year. The latest statistics are cold comfort to experts, who tell Yahoo Life they don’t anticipate much change to the country’s obesity rates in the near future.
Here are four key things the latest numbers tell us about the state of obesity in the U.S.
There isn’t a single state in the U.S. where the rate of obesity — meaning people who have a body mass index of 30 or higher — is below 20%. Aside from Washington, D.C., Colorado is the only state where fewer than a quarter of residents are obese (and barely — 24.9% of people there reported a BMI of 30 or greater).
Obesity is a global problem, but it’s a particularly pervasive one in the U.S. On average, 33.6% of Americans were obese last year. That’s approximately the same rate the CDC recorded in 2022, which marked a subtle drop from the previous year’s record prevalence: 33.9% of people were obese in 2021. The CDC considers obesity one of the top five risk factors for preventable premature death, and warns that it can elevate risks of chronic conditions including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers.
Dr. Gitanjali Srivastava, a professor of medicine in the division of diabetes, endocrinology and metabolism at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, tells Yahoo Life she’s unsurprised by the stubbornly high obesity rates. “Several factors contribute to this trend, including the widespread availability of high-calorie, low-nutrient foods, sedentary lifestyles and socioeconomic factors that limit access to healthy food and physical activity,” she says. “Additionally, there are complex interactions between genetics, environment and behavior that make obesity a challenging condition to manage and prevent.”
Dr. Jamy Ard, Wake Forest Baptist Health Weight Management Center, tells Yahoo Life he’s not surprised to see the national obesity rate remain high, and suspects it will stay that way for some time, even in the age of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs. He says there are two reasons: one technical and one social. The technical reason is that many people taking these medications have BMIs well above 30. They may see impressive weight loss on a medication, but perhaps their BMI goes from 40 to 31. “If the CDC calls up and they take the survey” — which is how the agency collected the new data — “they would still be classified as obese” based on their weight and height, explains Ard. That’s one of the reasons BMI has become a controversial metric for obesity.
As for the social reason: “To really change the prevalence of obesity, we have to stop the number of people who are abnormally gaining weight and developing obesity,” Ard says. “That’s the only way to bend this curve and that’s not a treatment question, that’s a prevention question … that’s a system’s question, and we have not had the political will to do that.”
In the Midwest, 36% of residents are considered obese. Rates are similar in the South, where 34.7% of people have high BMIs. Srivastava attributes high obesity rates in these areas to higher rates of poverty, limited availability of healthy food and fewer opportunities for exercise. “These regions often have diets high in calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods,” Srivastava says. She adds: “Cultural norms and traditions that may prioritize larger portion sizes and less physical activity” might contribute too, she adds.
Ard cites many of the same factors, but is less convinced that the Midwest and South have sufficiently different cultural practices and diets compared to the rest of the country to explain their higher rates of obesity. “Everywhere in the U.S., we have pretty easy access to calories, we live in a pretty mechanized society, so we don’t have to be physically active if we don’t want to,” he notes.
Instead, he suspects that a lack of green space, sidewalks and bike lanes, along with higher rates of poverty among people working jobs that afford them little time to prioritize their health and greater odds of food insecurity and living in a food desert create what he calls an “obesogenic environment.”
As an example of how a lack of sidewalks and bike lanes can affect health, he says: “Just imagine the difference between having to come up with a plan to get 10,000 steps in your day, versus ‘I’m just going to go to work, and I’ll get my 10,000 steps naturally’ — that’s a very different calculus.”
More than 35% of Black adults in 38 states are obese, the CDC report found. In 34 states, more than 35% of Hispanic people have a BMI of 30 or higher. American Indian and Alaska Natives also had a 35% obesity rate in 30 states. For comparison, the obesity rate among white adults is over 35% in 16 states (in no states was the prevalence that high among Asian Americans).
While the disparities are glaring, experts say they have little to do with race or ethnicity. There may be some small differences in metabolism and fat storage between people of certain ethnicities, but both Ard and Srivastava say that societal factors are generally more significant. “Race is just a social variable, it is not a biological variable,” says Ard. “Groups that come from minority communities tend to live in areas that are lower-resourced and these are groups of people who may, on average, be more likely to work jobs that don’t have time to prioritize health behaviors. This is one very clear example of how risks of disease are segregated by the social variable.”
