COVID-19 Working Paper: Obesity Prevalence Among U.S. Adult Subpopulations During the First Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Creators: name: Ehmke, Mariah D.
name: Restrepo, Brandon J.
Publisher: name: Unknown
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Agricultural and Food Policy
subject: Consumer/Household Economics
subject: Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety
subject: Health Economics and Policy
subject: Institutional and Behavioral Economics
subject: Labor and Human Capital
subject: Risk and Uncertainty
subject: COVID-19
subject: Coronavirus
subject: pandemic
subject: obesity
subject: rural obesity
subject: urban obesity
subject: household characteristics
subject: race
subject: ethnicity
subject: gender
subject: age
subject: employment
subject: income
subject: education
subject: Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System
subject: BRFSS

description: Data from the 2011–20 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System were leveraged to estimate obesity disparities prior to the spring 2020 arrival of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and during the first year of the pandemic, and then intra-pandemic changes in adult obesity rates were estimated across various population subgroups. Adult obesity was modeled as a function of various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics—household composition, urbanicity, Census region, age, race, gender, income, and education—over pre-pandemic and pandemic periods using a linear regression model estimated by ordinary least squares. The regression coefficients were then used to calculate the pre-pandemic and intra-pandemic obesity rates for the overall population and by subpopulation. Overall U.S. adult obesity prevalence was significantly higher during the first year of the pandemic by 1.3 percentage points (pp). This amounts to an obesity increase of 3.2 percent when compared with an obesity rate of 40.7 percent over the pre-pandemic period from January 1, 2019, to March 12, 2020. The net societal increase in early pandemic obesity rates was not evenly distributed across subpopulations. Obesity rates significantly increased by a larger amount for adults in subgroups with a lower accumulation of long-term human capital (such as education and skills) and greater potential need for institutional and societal support. Intra-pandemic obesity growth rates were significantly higher by 5.6 percent among adults with annual household incomes that qualified for benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and by 7.3 percent for adults whose education level was below a high school diploma. Higher intra-pandemic growth rates for obesity were also observed for young adults (aged 20–39) (5.6 percent) and adults aged 20 years or older living in the West Census region and west to the Pacific Ocean, which includes all States from Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico (7.6 percent).
description: The data are from the 2011–20 annual waves of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) from the Centers for Disease Control. After accounting for the BRFSS survey design, weighted BRFSS data are nationally representative of adults living in the United States (Centers for Disease Control, 2013). Self-reported Body Mass Index (BMI) was used to classify adults 20 years or older as having obesity (BMI≥30). BMI was corrected for self-reporting bias with data from the 2011–2012 to 2019–March 2020 cycles of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The period from January 1, 2019, to March 12, 2020, is the baseline pre-pandemic period upon which intra-pandemic shifts in obesity rates were estimated.