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How many Americans are obese and how has this become such a problem in the last 50 years?

In the last 50 years, the percentage of Americans that are obese has skyrocketed from 10% (male) and 12-15% (female) to 43% (male) and 41-42% (female). This increase is mainly attributed to the increased availability of fast food, the shift in agriculture away from agrarian production, and the presence of endocrine disrupting chemicals in our food supply. Additionally, people are eating too many macronutrients and not enough micronutrients, and being much more sedentary.
 
Transcript: "The question is, "How many Americans are obese and how has this become such a problem in the last 50 years?" Well, let's first define what we normally refer to when we talk about body composition, and that is a quick and dirty measure called body mass index. Body mass index is your weight or your mass relative to your height. It's usually expressed in meters per kilogram squared. So it's not a perfect measure of body composition because if you are muscular or very fit, you might possibly be considered overweight or obese according to this metric. But if you look at someone who's very fit and very muscular, then you obviously know that person's not overweight. They're just very muscular. But nonetheless, it's defined as 30 and above, according to BMI. And from the early 1960s when the average American male was about 10% obese and the average American woman was about 12% or 15% obese, now, today, the latest figures are somewhere around 43% of men and 41%, 42% of women. This is just ridiculous, how this has occurred over the last 50 or so years. So why has this happened? Well, this perfectly correlates with the rise in fast food, number one, the change in the way we produce our food, the agricultural shift away from an agrarian economy over 100 years ago to now. Less than 1% of the population is involved in agriculture in any way. So we changed the way we produce our food. We have much more synthetic inputs. We have genetic modification of our plants and species, and all these other chemicals and contaminants. So these are certainly two of the biggest problems. You have all these endocrine-disrupting, hormone modulators or mimickers in our food supply today, in our water, in our soil, in our air. There are a whole host of reasons why we are now so obese, but to me the biggest one is that we are simply overeating and undernourished. We're eating too many macronutrients, not enough micronutrients, and this is the problem in the context of obesity today. This is the major problem. And to a lesser extent, we're much more sedentary, but you cannot exercise your way to weight loss. So that's much less part of the problem than the nutritional piece."
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Dr. John E. Lewis

Plant-based Bodybuilder, Scientist, Author
The question is, "How many Americans are obese and how has this become such a problem in the last 50 years?" Well, let's first define what we normally refer to when we talk about body composition, and that is a quick and dirty measure called body mass index. Body mass index is your weight or your mass relative to your height. It's usually expressed in meters per kilogram squared. So it's not a perfect measure of body composition because if you are muscular or very fit, you might possibly be considered overweight or obese according to this metric. But if you look at someone who's very fit and very muscular, then you obviously know that person's not overweight. They're just very muscular. But nonetheless, it's defined as 30 and above, according to BMI. And from the early 1960s when the average American male was about 10% obese and the average American woman was about 12% or 15% obese, now, today, the latest figures are somewhere around 43% of men and 41%, 42% of women. This is just ridiculous, how this has occurred over the last 50 or so years. So why has this happened? Well, this perfectly correlates with the rise in fast food, number one, the change in the way we produce our food, the agricultural shift away from an agrarian economy over 100 years ago to now. Less than 1% of the population is involved in agriculture in any way. So we changed the way we produce our food. We have much more synthetic inputs. We have genetic modification of our plants and species, and all these other chemicals and contaminants. So these are certainly two of the biggest problems. You have all these endocrine-disrupting, hormone modulators or mimickers in our food supply today, in our water, in our soil, in our air. There are a whole host of reasons why we are now so obese, but to me the biggest one is that we are simply overeating and undernourished. We're eating too many macronutrients, not enough micronutrients, and this is the problem in the context of obesity today. This is the major problem. And to a lesser extent, we're much more sedentary, but you cannot exercise your way to weight loss. So that's much less part of the problem than the nutritional piece.