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* Adequate Intake (AI)
Adapted with permission from Recommended Dietary Allowances (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989), and DRI panel reports, 1997–2004
Hankering for more details? Notice something missing? Right — no recommended allowances for fat, carbohydrates, and, of course, water. You can find those (respectively) in Chapters 7, 8, and 12.
Chapter 4
Bigger But Not Better
IN THIS CHAPTER
According to the Federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in 2016, nearly seven of every ten American adults was either overweight or obese, two terms this chapter defines. And movie titles aside, the kids are not all right. Overall, the 2013 National Survey of Children’s Health reported that more than one in every five American children age 12 to 19 weigh too much. This excess poundage isn’t pretty, and it comes at a cost to our health. One 2019 study that followed more than 1,000,000 American women showed a link between obesity in middle age and dementia later in life. Another suggested that childhood obesity may affect the accuracy of routine blood tests. There’s also a cost in dollars and cents. The CDC puts the price of treating obesity-related illnesses at nearly $200 billion each year, an amount equal to about 6 percent of all medical spending in the United States.
If these trends continue, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine predict that by the year 2030, nearly 90 percent of American adults will be overweight, at which point the cost of treating their obesity-related health problems will approach $1 trillion a year. No wonder the American Heart Association says we’re in the grip of an obesity epidemic. And that is only one of the topics I cover in this chapter. Add on how much your own body should weigh, the methods by which to judge your obesity or lack thereof (and how to evaluate the accuracy of the numbers), plus the conditions that make obesity more hazardous to your health, and you have a lot to put on your plate about weight.
The Obesity Epidemic
The word epidemic conjures up images of polio, plague, flu, measles — a host of contagious illnesses that pass more or less easily from one person to another. But does obesity qualify? Believe it or not, maybe.
In 2007, Harvard sociologist Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, suggested in The New England Journal of Medicine that gaining weight may be a “socially contagious” event. In other words, people in groups
