CDC: 61 percent of U.S. adults overweight

ATLANTA - The American waistline continues to expand, with 61 percent of adults now considered overweight, the government reported Thursday.

And a growing number of Americans are not just overweight, but obese, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

More than a third of adults, 35 percent, are slightly or moderately overweight, up from 33 percent in the last survey, which covered 1988-94. More than a quarter of Americans, 26 percent, are considered obese, or grossly overweight, compared with 23 percent in the last survey.

The findings are part of the 1999 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which measured the height and weight of 1,615 people over age 20. Those figures are used to calculate body mass index, a formula involving a person's weight divided by his or her height squared.

A body-mass index of 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight, while obesity is 30 or higher.

People are getting heavier from a combination of too many calories and too little exercise, said Jeff Lancashire, a spokesman for the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. He said an estimated 40 percent of Americans are physically inactive.

''Over the last few years, we've seen that people's fat intake was dropping, but they're eating more calories,'' Lancashire said. ''So while people are turning to the diet foods, they're eating twice as much.''

The first such survey, which covered 1960 to 1962, found that only 43 percent of the population was overweight. Beginning in the 1980s, the survey and others like it began showing that Americans were gaining weight.

The government hopes to cut the obesity rate to 15 percent by 2010.

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On the Net:

Center for Health Statistics, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs

American Dietetic Association, http://www.eatright.org