Obesity rates in America are plateauing but skepticism remains that it is a sustainable trend

According to the CDC, as of August 2023, 40.3 percent of U.S. adults—some 100 million people—met the clinical definition for obesity. But this same estimate, which is based on National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey numbers gathered between 2021 and 2023, also seems remarkably low compared with prior readouts.

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The apparent drop has set off a wave of optimism: A recent editorial in The Washington Post, for instance, celebrated the fact that “the obesity crisis might have plateaued or begun to ease,” and in the Financial Times, the data journalist John Burn-Murdoch [argued] that America is already several years beyond its point of peak obesity. Both outlets suggest that this apparent change in public fortune has resulted from the spread of powerful new drugs for treating diabetes and obesity: Ozempic, Mounjaro, and the rest.

[Yet, for] all the expectations that are attached to the present age of GLP-1s, the past should be a source of caution. This is not the first time that obesity’s relentless spread has seemed to be abating, and it’s not the first time that such news has fit into a tidy narrative of progress in public health.

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