Here’s the real skinny: 70 percent of Americans are obese

Around 70 percent of all American adults are obese, at least according to a new measure.

Previous estimates had put the ratio at closer to 40 percent, but that was using the standard BMI (body-mass index) calculator to assess our weigh profile, but the measure is simplistic and doesn’t take account of fat distribution.

Researchers from Mass General Brigham used a new calculator that adds waist and body fat measurements to the BMI score on a group of more than 300,000 people and discovered that 68.6 percent met the new criteria for obesity, compared with 42.9 percent under the traditional BMI-based approach.

The entire increase was attributed to individuals classified as having anthropometric-only obesity—in other words, fat distribution to other areas of the body, such as the abdomen, that weren’t measured by BMI.

The picture was even worse among older participants: around 80 percent of the over-70s were obese according to the new measure.

Those who had anthropometric-only obesity, who would not have been labeled as obese under older standards, had higher rates of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and mortality.

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