January 18th, 2012

The CDC reports the US obesity rates have more or less held steady over the last decade.

“There is really a slowing down of the rapid increase in the prevalence of obesity that we saw in the 1980s and 1990s,” said Cynthia Ogden, a CDC epidemiologist and the report’s lead author, by telephone. “Those increases we saw earlier are not continuing, and we may be seeing a plateau.”

More than 78 million U.S. adults, or a third of the population, and about 12.5 million children were obese in 2009- 2010, according to the studies reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The studies are part of a continuing CDC effort to track obesity rates with updated numbers every two years.