Nearly one-third of Americans are obese, incurring an estimated annual medical cost of $147 billion. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2014 there was no state with a prevalence of obesity less than 20 percent.
This is shockingly different from the CDC numbers from 1990, at which time no state had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 15 percent.
The rise in obesity rates may be attributed to a number of different factors, from eating more energy than your body requires, to moving less or eating the wrong types of foods.
