- Obesity is a growing epidemic in the United States.
- According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 64% of adults in theUnited States over the age of 20 years old are overweight or obese (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/overwt.htm).
- The theme of this project is to show the increasing trends throughout the states and explain risk factors associated with obesity, showing its huge impact on public health in the United States.
- This topic is very interesting to me as a future dietitian. Also, I work for the Behavioral Weight Management Program at UVM. This program does research on the subject of obesity, which has also sparked my interest in the topic.
- I was interested in exploring obesity as a general public health problem throughout the US. With the support of my data, I want to answer the questions:
- Exactly how much has prevalence of obesity grown in the past ~20 years?
- Why is this important to public health, i.e. what other diseases is obesity associated with?
- I also want to touch upon what caused this huge health issue and what we can do to prevent or reverse this rise in this major health impact
