Over the past few decades, Americans have been getting bigger and bigger. According to the latest analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average American man now stands at 5-feet-9 1/4 inches tall and weighs 196 pounds — up 15 pounds from 20 years ago. For women, the change has been even more striking: The average female today stands 5-feet-3 3/4 inches and weighs 169 pounds. In 1994, her scale read 152 pounds.
Since the 1980s, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) has been charting obesity rates — and extreme obesity rates — as they’ve soared. All told, according to the CDC, some 33 percent of American adults are now overweight, 38 percent are obese, and 17 percent of children and adolescents are obese. Alongside this trend, we’ve seen rising rates of associated chronic disease — like diabetes, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome.
Clearly it’s gotten easier and easier to gain weight, and harder and harder to avoid it.
So what’s going on here? There’s an obvious answer — people eat more than they burn off. But increasingly public health experts agree that they are not consciously choosing to overeat.
"The food environment is a strong predictor of how we eat," says Scott Kahan, director of the National Center for Weight and Wellness and a faculty member at both Johns Hopkins and George Washington University. "And in America, the unhealthiest foods are the tastiest foods, the cheapest foods, the largest-portion foods, the most available foods, the most fun foods."
To make things more complicated, there’s a supply problem. Americans are told to eat nutrient-dense foods like broccoli and Brussels sprouts instead of energy-dense foods like soda and french fries, yet there aren’t enough nutrient-dense foods to go around. Researchers have pointed out that if Americans actually followed the US dietary guidelines and started to eat the volume and variety of produce health officials recommend, they wouldn’t have nearly enough to meet consumer demand.
As of 2013, potatoes and tomatoes made up half of the legumes and vegetables available in the country, according to the US Department of Agriculture. And when Americans do eat tomatoes and potatoes, they’re often accompanied by so much sugar, fat, and salt that they’re propelled to overeat.
