Latest Statistics on America's Overweight Population

More than two-thirds of adults and one-third of children in the United States are overweight or obese, according to data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. Authors of recent Journal of the American Medical Association studies looking specifically at obesity found that children and adolescents (2 to 19 years old) who were screened from 2009 to 2010 had a 16.9 percent obesity rate, and adults had a 35.7 percent obesity rate. These numbers have increased significantly over the last 12 years for African-American and Mexican-American women, while all groups of men showed a significant trend toward obesity over the same period.