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Guidelines on Overweight and Obesity: Electronic Textbook ![]() |
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Demographic Variations in Overweight and Obesity PrevalenceAlthough NHANES III data show that the prevalence of overweight and obesity is much higher in African-American and Mexican-American women than in white women or in men, these data provide ethnicity-specific estimates of overweight and obesity prevalence for only three racial-ethnic groups: non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and Mexican-Americans. Examination survey data indicating a high overweight and obesity prevalence in other ethnic groups (e.g., for Puerto Ricans and Cuban-Americans) are available from the Hispanic HANES (HHANES) (1982-1984) (27) and for American Indians (26) and Pacific-Islander Americans (50), from smaller population-specific studies (see Appendix III). The prevalence of overweight
and obesity is generally higher for men and women in racial-ethnic minority
populations than in U.S. whites, with the exception of Asian-Americans, for
whom overweight and obesity prevalence is lower than in the general population
(51). In the 1982-1984 HHANES, the
age-adjusted prevalence of a BMI of
Women in the United States with low incomes or low education are more likely to be obese than those of higher socioeconomic status; the association of socioeconomic status with obesity is less consistent in men (53). Obesity is less common after the age of 70 among both men and women, possibly due to a progressive decrease in BMI with increasing age past the fifth decade or to an excess in mortality associated with increasing BMI in the presence of increasing age (1). |