patrick.net

Patrick says

If people are truly hungry, they will gladly accept free healthy food direct from the government instead of synthetic factory food marked up at retail.

Patrick says

Give food assistance as food only, never as EBT/SNAP cash. Recipients get a weekly pickup of beef, bread, vegetables, fruit, butter, and milk.

True, the counter arguments though is that it increases bureaucracy and costs more. I'm for it for the record, but without paying a lot for handing out the food. Maybe a cheap delivery service, must have valid home address.

About 75% of US adults considered to have obesity under new Lancet commission criteria

Key takeaways:

Using NHANES data from 2017 to 2023, obesity prevalence in the U.S. is 75.2% when excess adiposity cutoffs are used.

Among adults with a BMI of less than 25 kg/m2, 38.5% had obesity under new Lancet criteria.

The prevalence of obesity was 75.2% among adults in the U.S. when new criteria proposed by The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Commission was used to diagnose the disease, researchers reported in a JAMA Network Open research letter.

As Healio previously reported, a paper published by The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Commission in January 2025 stated adults could be diagnosed with obesity if they had one measure of excess body fat plus a BMI that indicated obesity, two measures of excess body fat without using BMI, or by measuring body fat directly in a DXA scan. Using BMI, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio and waist-to-height ratio cutoffs detailed in the commission’s paper, researchers assessed the prevalence of obesity using National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data from 2017 to 2023.

About 75% of participants in NHANES from 2017 to 2023 had obesity under newly proposed excess adiposity criteria.
Data were derived from Al-Roub NM, et al. JAMA Netw Open. 2025;doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.49124.
“Using nationally representative data, we found that three in four U.S. adults were estimated to have obesity,” Kamil Faridi, MD, MSc, assistant professor in medicine in the section of cardiovascular medicine, department of internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine, told Healio. “Importantly, we found that practically all adults with BMI of 30 kg/m2 or higher have obesity, as do 80% of adults in the overweight BMI category of 25 kg/m2 to 30 kg/m2, and nearly 40% of adults in the normal BMI category of less than 25 kg/m2. These findings demonstrate that a large majority of the U.S. population are at risk for or already have adverse health consequences related to excess adiposity and highlight the significant limitations of using BMI alone to define obesity.”

The study group included 14,414 adults, of whom 39.9% had obesity as measured through BMI alone.

Excess adiposity common
When an obesity cutoff of a waist-to-height ratio of more than 0.5 was used, 75.2% of adults had obesity using The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Commission’s criteria. The prevalence of obesity was 100% for adults with a BMI of 30 kg/m2 or higher, 80.4% among those with a BMI of 25 kg/m2 to 29.9 kg/m2, and 38.5% for adults with a BMI of less than 25 kg/m2.

Faridi described the high prevalence of obesity among the study participants as “very concerning.”

“It demonstrates most Americans are at risk of poor health related to obesity-related conditions such as cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome, including diabetes, heart attack, stroke, heart failure and many other diseases including cancer and infection,” Faridi said.

Of the study group, 80% had an elevated waist-to-height ratio that indicated obesity according to the commission’s criteria, 73.1% had an elevated waist-to-hip ratio and 58.3% had a waist circumference indicating obesity.

Faridi said one of the key takeaways of the study is that health care professionals should not rely solely on BMI to diagnose obesity.

“Waist circumference more appropriately identifies excess adiposity, particularly the metabolically harmful visceral adiposity, but unfortunately waist circumference is rarely measured or used in clinical practice,” Faridi said. “In light of the Lancet Commission’s new obesity definition and recommendations, millions of adults are therefore not appropriately screened, identified or managed for health risks directly related to excess adiposity. Waist circumference measurements should be standardized and included as part of routine health visits and should be documented in the electronic health record.”

More research needed
When researchers used a higher waist-to-height ratio of 0.6, obesity prevalence dropped to 58.4% of the study group. Faridi said using a waist-to-height ratio cutoff of 0.5 may potentially overestimate excess adiposity and some studies use higher cutoffs, which is why researchers also analyzed an alternative cutoff of 0.6.

“Our study was not designed to determine the optimal cutoff values of anthropometric criteria for either obesity prevalence estimates or individual clinical care,” Faridi said. “Even so, our findings indicate that further research is needed to determine the optimal criteria cutoffs under the Lancet Commission definition. In particular, further research on cutoffs is needed based on age, sex and race and ethnicity, and future studies should explore the potential implications of these criteria for screening and management.”

Faridi said the study combined the commission’s definition of preclinical and clinical obesity, and more research is needed to assess the prevalence of each of those conditions separately.

https://www.healio.com/news/endocrinology/20260107/about-75-of-us-adults-considered-to-have-obesity-under-new-lancet-commission-criteria

zzyzzx says

Doubt this will actually happen. If Southwest had larger more expensive seating options, not double the price it could work, but there will be constant arguments from the fatties. Two economy seats on say United or American are more than one 1st class seat. So they're going to argue the 2nd seat should be half off. That would destroy the airlines margins.

It has to be you're either not fat or you don't fly rule to be honest. There are trains, buses and cars still. Flying isn't a right. There are height and weight limits for all sorts of things. If you're boating and there's 8 people that weigh 350lbs you could easily be stopped by DNR or the coast guard and fined and have to return to shore if over the boats weight limit.

Fact is that in an emergency they're a huge (literally and figuratively) safety hazard if you need to exit the plane quickly. I'd have no problem asking an FA to be moved or have the fatty removed from the plane for mine and everyone's safety. It would cause a scene, but I don't care.

I figure that this probably belongs here as well:

an easier solution is to set up a section of seats in economy class wirh shoulder height partitions between them. The fatso's won't buy those seats. Another plus would be to keep people from laying across the seats.