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Americans Are Fat and Binge Drink, Studies Say Wed Jan 1, 2:33 AM ET By
Andrew Stern
CHICAGO
(Reuters) - For the bleary-eyed able to stomach a tidbit of health news after
ringing in the New Year, more Americans are getting fat and drunk each year,
with sometimes deadly results, researchers said on Tuesday. More
than one in five American adults could be classified as obese in 2001, up almost
6 percent from the year before. And more than one in four Americans engage in
bouts of binge drinking -- defined as five or more drinks at one sitting with
the goal of getting drunk -- up 35 percent from 1995. "I
guess you could say we're fat and drunk," said Timothy Naimi, a researcher
at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, summarizing a
pair of studies based on a huge telephone survey of more than 200,000 adults. "We're
a society that is somewhat taken with excesses," Naimi said. The
studies' publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association was
timed by the journal to coincide with the revelry associated with New Year's
eve. DEADLY
NEW YEAR'S U.S.
driving fatalities more than double on New Year's day as celebrants take to the
roads. According
to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an average of 393 people
died in traffic accidents after midnight on New Year's day over the past three
years, more than half of them alcohol-related. That compares to the daily
average of about 115 traffic deaths -- roughly 42,000 a year -- 40 percent of
them blamed on alcohol. Bingeing
-- whether on alcohol or food -- is a potentially fatal health problem, CDC
researchers said. Abuse
of alcohol kills roughly 100,000 Americans a year, the third-leading cause of
preventable deaths after smoking and physical inactivity. Binge drinking
accounted for roughly half those 100,000 deaths, Naimi said. Drinking
and driving was a particularly deadly combination among binge drinkers, who were
14 times more likely to get behind the wheel than adults who drank but not to
excess. Binge drinking is also behind many sexual assaults, domestic violence
incidents, and other crimes, the report said. Drinking
to get drunk is more prevalent among men than women, with men accounting for 81
percent of the 1.5 billion U.S. binge-drinking episodes in 2001, it said. Three-quarters
of binge drinkers were people who otherwise considered themselves moderate
drinkers, the study found, and the practice is not confined to the college-age
set, with 70 percent of episodes undertaken by people over age 25. Roughly
half of adult Americans do not drink at all. Efforts
to stem binge drinking might find a parallel in anti-smoking campaigns that seem
to be working, Naimi said. But
while tax increases on cigarettes have helped choke off demand especially among
the young, alcohol taxes have not kept pace with inflation over the past two
decades, he said. Meanwhile,
more than a dozen U.S. states lag in lowering the legal blood-alcohol limit for
impaired drivers, legislation that has been found to save lives, and many
doctors ignore public health pleas to question patients about their drinking
habits. DRUNK
AND PROUD Too
often, Naimi said, heavy drinking episodes are accepted as a joke or heralded as
a badge of courage, and ebullient liquor advertising too often targets the
young. The growing fad of "supersizing" bar drinks has become as
common as fast-food franchises' expanded portions of fatty French fries. "Of
course, wagging my finger doesn't carry too much water," Naimi said, adding
that the goal was moderation, not necessarily abstinence. "We don't live in
prohibition." Obesity
is another killer, and its prevalence among U.S. adults nearly doubled in the
past decade to 21 percent of adults, the CDC researchers said. Obesity
has been declared a global problem by the World Health Organization, and 45
percent of adults in some oil-rich Persian Gulf nations are obese, study author
Ali Mokdad said. Europeans
are generally slimmer than Americans, but are catching up fast. "We
drive longer distances, everything is done by machines, we spend all our time on
computers," Mokdad said by way of explaining the fattening of some
Americans. Eating healthy foods requires effort, he said, while eating a bad
diet is relatively inexpensive. Excess
fat, like alcohol abuse, causes a host of related health problems, the
researchers said. For
instance, the rising rates of obesity corresponds with an increase in the
prevalence of diabetes, which afflicts more than one out of 12 adults, an
increase of 8 percent in 2001 from the year before. |