DEAKIN, Australia, May 12, 2009 (UPI via COMTEX) -- The rise in obesity in the
United States since the 1970s was virtually all due to increased calorie intake,
researcher in Australia concluded.
Boyd Swinburn of Deakin University in Australia and colleagues tested 1,399
adults and 963 children to determine how many calories their bodies burn.
The researchers calculated how much adults needed to eat to maintain a stable
weight and how much children needed to eat to maintain a normal growth curve.
The researchers calculated how much Americans were eating, using data on the
amount of food produced and imported, minus the amount exported, thrown away and
used for animals or other non-human uses from the 1970s to 2000s. The
researchers used data from a nationally representative survey that recorded the
weight of Americans in the 1970s and early 2000s.
The researchers found that in children, the predicted and actual weight increase
matched exactly -- indicating that the increases in calorie intake alone could
explain the weight increase over the 30-year period.
"For adults, we predicted that they would be about 24 pounds heavier, but in
fact they were about 19 pounds heavier," Swinburn said in a statement. "That
suggests that excess food intake still explains the weight gain, but that there
may have been increases in physical activity over the 30 years that have blunted
what would otherwise have been a higher weight gain."
The findings were presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Amsterdam.
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