"I'm sorry, cookies are not a healthy choice," Grover said to Cookie Monster, a stern consternation eclipsing his Muppet eyes, in a Sesame Street book released last year. Despite cultural changes like the taming of Cookie Monster, which have been tough to miss, the newest numbers about U.S. obesity trends in the last ten years don't look great. They just made big news after a press statement by the CDC director and other officials, and the analysis will be published tomorrow morning in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The headlines just published in the last hour are misleading:
The sound bites are also more congratulatory than the numbers seem to warrant. "We continue to see signs that, for some children in this country, the scales are tipping," CDC Director Tom Frieden said in a press statement, having a little fun with "scales" there. "This confirms that at least for kids, we can turn the tide and begin to reverse the obesity epidemic."
Michelle Obama said, "I am thrilled at the progress we've made over the last few years in obesity rates among our youngest Americans."
It's true that there was a substantial decrease in the obesity rate among a small age group, kids ages two to five. It fell from 14 to 8 percent (the aforementioned 43 percent).
But rates among teenagers increased, and the actual conclusion of the study is that seventeen percent of kids and more than one third of adults in the U.S. remain obese. Over the last ten years in the United States, the final line of the study reads:
"Overall, there have been no significant changes in obesity prevalence in youth or adults."
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