Utahns fatter but not fattest

The alarming news is that another year has gone by, and we Americans are fatter than ever.

According to a Washington, D.C., organization called the Trust for America's Health — a nonprofit dedicated to watch-dogging the public health or lack thereof — nearly one out of every three of us is obese, two of every three are overweight, and every single state in the country got fatter in 2008.

The even more alarming news is this: The statistics are based on information collected over the phone by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from hundreds of thousands of Americans whose answers were strictly on the honor system.

That's right. Most people probably underreported their weight.

"It's like on driver's licenses," said Liz Richardson, the nonprofit organization's spokeswoman, "people tend to hedge up on their height and hedge down on their weight. So yeah, the numbers we get are actually probably on the low end. If anything, I'd say we have an even bigger problem than what we're reporting."

It did not appear the pun was intended.

Each year, Liz explained, the CDC conducts a survey of some 350,000 Americans, asking questions that include basically everything you wouldn't ask at a cocktail party or the company picnic: age, height and weight.

These statistics are then forwarded to the Trust for America's Health, where the Body Mass Index (BMI) of all the respondents is computed. The BMI uses a mathematical formula that essentially divides your height into your weight and determines if a person is underweight, overweight or obese. A BMI over 25 means you're overweight. Over 30 means you're obese. Under 25 means go ahead and order the pie.

(Note: You can easily compute your own BMI on the Internet by typing "BMI calculator" into the search engine.)

It's all quite impersonal and yet, on a national level, quite personal.

In 1980, the national average for adult obesity was 15 percent. Twenty-nine years later, it's double that.

Here in Utah, though, there is still something to feel good about, relatively speaking.

The adult obesity rate here is 22.5 percent, which is well below the national average of 30 percent. The adult combined overweight and obesity rate is 57 percent, again well below the national norm of 67 percent.

Still, we're fat and getting fatter. Last year, only 21.8 percent of us were obese; the year before that, 21.1 percent; the year before that, 20.8 percent; and the year before that, 20.4 percent. There's an obvious trend.

But we're not as fat as Mississippi, where its 32.5 percent obesity rate leads the nation.