How Boring Math Can Help You Lose Weight and Combat National Epidemic Obesity

Do you know what a mathematician finds out to solve the obesity problem?

Dr. Carson Chow is an MIT-trained mathematician and physicist. He was a faculty of the math department at the University of Pittisburgh. Recently he works for National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease – a branch of the National Institutes of Health. He’s in charge of a project trying to figure out why 2 in 3 Americans are overweight, 1 in 3 are obese.

Consider the facts:

- Between 1975 and 2005, the average weight of Americans had increased by about 20 pounds.

- Since the 1970s, the national obesity rate had jumped from around 20 percent to over 30 percent.

- The levels of physical activity have not really changes in the past 30 years.

After crunching large volume of numbers, he finally developed a mathematical model to answer a host of questions about weight loss. The mathematical equation says:

- The conventional widsom of 3500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong! It’s not a constant as your body changes when you lose weight.

- The fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight.

- If you eat 100 calories fewer a day, you will lose 10 pounds on the average in 3 years – if you don’t cheat.

- Large variations in daily food intake will not cause variation in weight as long as the average food intake over a year is about the same, because your body responds slowly to food intake.

- All diets work. But the reaction time is really slow, on the order of a year. Most people aren’t patient and wait long enough to see what they’re doing to stabilize their weight.

His conclusion?

Overproduction of food in the United States.

Since the 1970s, the government changed agricultural policy to promote farming to full production. The price of foods went down and the number of calories available to the average American increased by about 1000 a day!

Well, what do think people do with that extra 1000 calories? They eat it, of course. If you know that Americans are already wasting a lot of foods, obesity would be even worse if they eat them all.

Take-away Message

Watch what you eat and how much you eat and when.

If you’re interested in learning how to use the mathematician’s equation, go to NIH site below for the Body Weight Simulator.

http://bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov/

American Obesity Rate Expected to Reach 42% by 2030

About 32 million more Americans will become obese by 2030, upping obesity rates to 42 percent of the U.S. population, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report also predicts that the proportion of Americans who are severely obese, meaning more than 100 pounds overweight, will reach 11 percent, about double the current rate.

The report’s authors give a sobering price tag for these predictions: such an increase would create $550 billion of obesity-related health care costs.

Eric Finkelstein, one of the authors of the report, said the prospect of such increasing rates, particularly those of severely obese Americans, is alarming since efforts aimed at helping people lose weight have so far proven relatively ineffective.

“Their weight continues to increase. Over the last 10 years, it has gone up tremendously,” he said in a press conference. “This is a group at great risk of health complications, and yet they are increasing at an even greater rate than the rate of obesity.”

The report was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and was released at the CDC’s Weight of the Nation conference today, a gathering focused on the impact of the obesity epidemic. The authors analyzed data collected from each state and made projections based on a number of factors influencing obesity rates, including the cost of healthy and unhealthy foods, gas prices and Internet access.

“Predicting obesity is tricky and no one variable showed up as causing obesity,” Finkelstein said.

Although recent data suggest that rates of obesity have reached a plateau, current rates of obesity are still alarmingly high. About 34 percent of adults are currently obese, creating a whole host of expensive, chronic health problems, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

The report’s authors said a number of factors could lead to the predicted rise in obesity. About two-thirds of Americans are currently overweight and could continue to gain weight and move into the obese category.

Dr. William Dietz, one of the study’s authors and director of the CDC’s division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, also noted that children who are currently overweight or obese will likely be a major source of the increasing rates.

“We know that about 50 percent of severe obesity in adults is consequence of obesity in childhood,” he said.

Currently about 17 percent of children and adolescents are obese.

Anti-obesity measures such as better urban design, access to recreational facilities, workplace health promotion and new drugs could help reign in the problem, the authors noted.