Here’s a fun fact to kick off your week: more than three-quarters of American adults may actually be obese—nearly double the rate we’ve been told.
And while the health establishment scrambles to update its outdated measurement tools, nobody’s talking about the elephant in the room: the corporate food system that got us here.
WHAT’S GOING ON: A new study published in JAMA Network Open found that when doctors stop relying solely on Body Mass Index (BMI) and start incorporating waist-based measurements, the obesity rate among U.S. adults jumps from 40% to a staggering 75.2%. That’s not a typo.
Three out of four American adults may qualify as obese under the updated definition proposed by The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Commission, which more than 70 medical organizations worldwide have endorsed.
THE DETAILS: Researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard, Yale, and Yale New Haven Health analyzed data from over 14,000 participants in the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The findings are grim: nearly four in ten adults with a “normal” BMI were found to have excess body fat when waist measurements were applied. The rate climbs sharply with age—nearly all adults over 50 met the new obesity criteria.
Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford of Harvard Medical School put it bluntly: “Obesity is by far the most significant chronic disease in human history.”
OF COURSE: We’re supposed to treat this as a medical mystery requiring better screening tools—and sure, BMI is a blunt instrument that misses dangerous visceral fat around our organs. But let’s not pretend this epidemic materialized from nowhere.
American diets have been systematically hijacked by food corporations pumping ultra-processed garbage loaded with sugar, seed oils, and unpronounceable additives into every corner of the grocery store. It’s cheap, it’s engineered to be addictive, and it’s wildly profitable.
The same capitalist logic that pays workers poverty wages ensures the cheapest calories available are the ones most likely to kill you.
WHY IT MATTERS: Obesity isn’t just about weight—it’s linked to over 230 chronic diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
This is a public health catastrophe decades in the making, and the ruling class that profited from it will never be held accountable. Instead, we’ll get more individualized shame about “personal responsibility” while Big Food lobbies against meaningful regulation.
BOTTOM LINE: The problem isn’t that Americans are lazy. The problem is a food system built to extract profit, not nourish people. Until we name that, we’re just rearranging deck chairs on a very sick ship.