Obesity dipped in U.S. adults last year for first time in a decade

Obesity dipped in U.S. adults last year for the first time in more than a decade, research found. That might be due, in part, to weight loss drugs like Ozempic.

Obesity dipped slightly in U.S. adults last year, research found — the first time in more than a decade that the country has seen a downward trend. That might be due, in part, to the recent rise of blockbuster weight loss drugs like Ozempic, according to the study authors.

The findings, published Friday in the journal JAMA Health Forum, showed the most significant decrease in the South, particularly among women and adults ages 66 to 75.

The study looked at body mass index measurements of more than 16.7 million adults across different geographic regions, age groups, sexes, races and ethnicities from 2013 through 2023. BMI measurements, which are a standard but limited way to estimate obesity as a ratio of weight to height, were gathered from electronic health records.

The researchers found that the prevalence of adult obesity in the U.S. decreased from 46% in 2022 to 45.6% in 2023. (Those are slightly higher shares than the estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which says around 40% of U.S. adults had obesity from 2021 to 2023.)

The results were not uniform across demographics and geographic regions, said Benjamin Rader, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an author of the study.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/obesity-dipped-us-adults-rcna183952

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