U.S. Has Never Been Fatter Than It Is Now, CDC Says

The rate of obesity in the United States is continuously growing, according to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The CDC report contains data from its 2015 National Health Interview Survey, which polled 100,000 adult Americans. According to the report, obesity rates in the United States are increasing by the year, with about 30.4 percent of adults aged 20 and above were reportedly obese, as compared with 29.9 percent in 2014. This shows that over 97 million adult Americans are overweight.

The 2015 figures may only be up marginally from that of 2014, but this shows a continuation of an ongoing trend since 1997, when researchers had started using the survey and when bout 19.4 percent of Americans were obese.

"That is not a good trend," said Brian Ward, health statistician at CDC's National Center for Health Statistics and one of the authors of the study, in a report in CNN. "[But] it is not necessarily anything unexpected."

In the study, CDC researchers calculated the BMI or body mass index of over 9,000 American adults. Subjects who have a BMI of 30 and above are considered obese, while those that fall between 25 and 29 are overweight.

CDC also found that among Americans aged 18 and above in 2015, 9.5 percent had diabetes compared with 9.1 percent in the previous year.

Researchers also found that obesity rates were higher among black American adults than white and Hispanic adults. According to the study, 45 percent of black women were obese, compared with 32.6 percent of Hispanic women and 27.2 percent of white women.

Likewise, 35.1 percent of black men were obese, compared with 32 percent of Hispanic men and 30.2 percent of white men.

In another recent study published by Gallup, only two states have obesity rates below 20%. These are Colorado (19.8%) and Hawaii (18.5%). The state with the highest obesity rate is West Virginia at (37%).