Report shows overweight Americans headed toward more severe obesity

America’s obesity crisis is getting worse, according to a new report that shows that obese Americans now outnumber overweight ones.

As of 2012, there were 67.6 million Americans age 25 and older who were obese, and 65.2 million who were overweight, according to a study from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. The study was recently published in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal.

“This is a wake-up call to implement policies and practices designed to combat overweight and obesity,” Li Yang, one of the co-authors of the study, said in a statement.

The researchers used data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2007 to 2012 to determine the body mass index (BMI) of the study’s sample size of more than 15,200 people. Those with a BMI of between 25 to 29.9 were considered overweight and those with a BMI of over 30 were considered obese.

By their calculations, almost 75% of men and 67% of women were struggling with their weight. Some 37% of women were obese, and 30% overweight. Men, on the other hand, were more likely to be overweight (40%) than obese (35%).

Many argue that BMI is not the best way to measure obesity. Even the CDC admits that while “BMI can be used for population assessment of overweight and obesity” and can be used as “a screening tool for body fatness”, it is not diagnostic.

So why is it still used? “Because calculation requires only height and weight, it is inexpensive and easy to use for clinicians and for the general public,” according to the CDC.

Nonetheless, the increase in the number of Americans struggling with their weight is of serious concern to doctors. America’s weight has been trending upward for a number of years. According to Gallup - which also based its findings on BMI - the US obesity rate went from 25.5% in 2008 to 27.1% in 2013 to 27.7% in 2014.

Obesity can lead to many different health complications, such as diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and heart problems.

“Obesity is going to surpass cigarette smoking as the leading cause of the cancer deaths in the US,” Mitchell Roslin, chief of bariatric surgery at Lenox Hill hospital, told CBS. According to him, obesity is increasingly a problem among young Americans. “This generation is not going to outlive their predecessors.”

This is not just a problem in the US.

In Britain, obesity is currently the cause of one in five cancer deaths and could become responsible for more deaths than smoking within 10 to 15 years, according to Jennifer Ligibel of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University.

“The average weight of our citizens is increasing dramatically,” she said. “We’ve really got a critical mass of evidence where we see this relationship: the heavier people are more at risk.”