This is probably not something we want to hear about right in the middle of the holiday season, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced an unfortunate fact: 7 out of 10 American adults are overweight and 38% are obese. What’s worse is that a new Gallup poll found that most (37%!) of them don’t even know it.
According to a Patch.com article, a lot has changed in the past three decades: “Around 1990, about 56 percent of American adults qualified as overweight or obese, and 44 percent considered themselves to be overweight.”
It is unclear what the shift is attributed to, but another unfortunate fact to come out of the Gallup poll is that Americans reported a higher ideal weight—8 pounds higher than 30 years ago, to be exact. (The average ideal weight is currently at 161 pounds.) So not only are we overweight, but we don’t know it and we are happy to be heavier than ever before. The Gallup poll also found that a majority of people (53%) would like to lose weight. So perhaps it’s time to put the social media and smart devices down and get some fresh air!
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