Obesity is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality, causing some 2.6 million deaths worldwide each year. In the U.S., survey data on obesity on a national and state level is obtained using information gathered by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), which uses telephone interviews; national data is also collected using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which does in-person interviews and follow-up height and weight measurements on people who agree to a clinical exam. Lead author Majid Ezzati, Associate Professor of International Health at HSPH, and his colleagues analyzed and compared the data from the two surveys in order to quantify the level of bias when people self-report their height and weight, especially in a telephone interview.
Based on this new understanding of the survey data, the authors found that, on average, women tend to underestimate their weight while men do not. When it comes to height, young and middle-aged men tend to overestimate their height more than women in the same age group. In 2002, the corrected prevalence of obesity in the U.S. population was 28.7% for adult men and 34.5% for adult women, more than 50% higher than previously estimated.
The research, which presents the first-ever corrected estimates of obesity for individual states, found that Southern stat
'"/>
Contact: Todd Datz
tdatz@hsph.harvard.edu
617-432-3952
Harvard School of Public Health
1-May-2006