America's Teen Obesity Epidemic

​It is estimated that 50 percent of all American teenagers will be obese by the year 2030 if they fail to cut their calorie consumption and increase their physical activity.


According to a new report released by the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, half of all current U.S. teenagers will be obese by the year 2030 if they fail to change their habits by reducing their calorie consumption and increasing their levels of physical activity. Although there are multiple reasons 50% America’s teenagers will eventually become obese, one of the primary causes is thought to be the lifestyles and eating habits that they formed in childhood as over the last 30 years the number of obese children in the country has risen dramatically.  Back in 1980, just 6.5 percent of U.S. children aged 6 to 11 were obese. By 2010, the number of obese children in the same age group had more than tripled with nearly 20 percent categorized as obese and the rate of obesity among America’s teenagers rose from just 5 percent to over 17 percent in the same time period.

In that time, the diets of American teens changed to include more far soft drinks and snacks than previous generations consumed. Consuming more calories every year, America’s teens now consume a diet with an average of 300 more calories a day than they did back in 1985 and 600 more calories than in 1970. The size of meal portions has also risen as the size of everything from hamburgers to soft drinks have nearly doubled across the nation in the years following 1990 when teenagers ate hamburgers that were half the size they are today. The weight of an average restaurant cheeseburger today is now about 8 ounces compared to the average 4.5 ounce cheeseburger in 1990. Dieticians and nutrition experts have estimated that if today’s teens would just give up 160 calories per day, or about the same number of calories as in a 12-ounce, sugar-sweetened soft drink, they could reduce today’s alarming teen obesity rate to just 5 percent by 2020.

Where a teenager lives in the United States also appears to have a connection to the rising obesity problem as the numbers show the southern states are more heavily burdened with the problem. The numbers of obese adults and teens in the 30 states with the highest overall obesity rates today show that 26 percent are currently in the South, led by Mississippi with a staggering 34 percent obesity rate, followed by Louisiana with 33 percent, and West Virginia in third place with 32 percent. Both teens and adults weigh less when you get outside of the South as shown by the comparatively lower rates of obesity in states like Colorado with a 20 percent obesity rate and Hawaii with 21 percent. The state a U.S. teenager lives in is also related to the amount of physical activity they engage in, and as countless studies have shown, teens who do not exercise regularly can count on gaining unwanted weight faster and sooner than teens who are active. When it comes to the teens who do not exercise at all, the southern states again have the highest numbers with Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia all weighing in with more than 30 percent of their teens admitting they exercise only infrequently if at all.

The numbers may sound foreboding for America’s teens going into the future, but the equation could easily be changed if everyone who is currently sixteen in the nation today simply ate less and exercised more. If they do not, it appears the prediction of a 50 percent obesity rate within the next two decades will unfortunately be realized.