Obesity May Be More Prevalent Than We Thought
New research using an updated definition of obesity suggests that many more people may have the disease than previous studies have suggested.
It’s estimated that 40 percent of adults in the United States have obesity. But much of the research used to produce those estimates has relied on body mass index, a measure of weight relative to height. Doctors have increasingly come to see B.M.I. as an imperfect tool for defining obesity, because it doesn’t distinguish excess weight from body fat or from bone and muscle.
Last year, after years of debate about whether obesity is a disease and how to measure it, an international commission defined “clinical obesity” as a chronic, systemic illness characterized by tissue and organ dysfunction resulting from excess body fat.
Excerpted from The New York Times
