Reuters, Bill Berkrot, Novemner 23, 2010
More than half of Americans will have diabetes or be prediabetic by 2020 at a cost to the U.S. health care system of $3.35 trillion if current trends go on unabated, according to analysis of a new report released on Tuesday by health insurer UnitedHealth Group Inc.
Diabetes and prediabetes will account for an estimated 10 percent of total health care spending by the end of the decade at an annual cost of almost $500 billion — up from an estimated $194 billion this year, according …

Bloomberg News, Pat Wechsler, August 3, 2010
The U.S. is losing the battle of the bulge, and Mississippi is the state reporting the largest percentage of fat people.
The number of states with an adult obesity rate of 30 percent or more has tripled, to nine, since 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report today. Mississippi had the highest rate, 34 percent. About 75 million Americans are considered obese, the Atlanta-based CDC said.
Being fat is costing Americans as much as $150 billion a year from ills such …

Americans are fat, but at least theyre not getting fatter.
Sixty-eight percent of Americans are overweight or obese, but that number hasnt changed much in the last decade, according to a team of doctors Wednesday in two studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Doctors feared that the trend of ever-increasing rates of obesity that started in the 1980s had no end.
But the new findings reveal that from 1999 to 2008, the percent of obese women hovered between 33.2 and 35.5 percent, and the percent of obese men ranged between …

The number of US adults following a healthy lifestyle has fallen in the last two decades despite increasing public health campaigns, a study shows.
A review of two studies stretching back to 1988 found the proportion of obese adults has crept up to over a third.
Levels of exercise also fell, as did consumption of fruit and vegetables.
The American Journal of Medicine study found those with health problems were no more likely to follow a healthy lifestyle than their fitter peers.
Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina compared two large-scale studies …