Home > Authors > John Komlos > The trend of mean BMI values of US adults, birth cohorts 1882-1986 indicates that the obesity epidemic began earlier than hitherto thought
The trend of mean BMI values of US adults, birth cohorts 1882-1986 indicates that the obesity epidemic began earlier than hitherto thought
"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. The trend in the BMI values of the US population has not been estimated accurately because time series data are unavailable and because the focus has been on calculating period effects. In contrast to the prevailing strategies, we estimate the trend and rate of change of BMI values by birth cohorts stratified by gender and ethnicity born 1882-1986. We use loess additive regression models to estimate age and trend effects of BMI values of US-born black and white adults measured between 1959 and 2006. We use all the NHES and NHANES survey data and find that the increase in BMI was already underway among the birth cohorts of the early 20th century. The rate of increase was fastest among black females; for the three other...