Report: 40% of Arkansas Adults Obese

A new report finds that 40% of adult Arkansans are obese and ranks the state’s adult obesity rate as the third highest among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, up from 12^th in the previous year.

The “State of Obesity 2024: Better Policies for a Healthier America” report, released today (Sept. 12) by Trust for America’s Health, uses 2023 data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to identify key obesity trends at the state and national levels.

According to this year’s installment of the annual report, Arkansas is one of 23 states with obesity rates at or above 35%, up from 22 the previous year. In last year’s report, Arkansas was tied with Iowa for the twelfth-highest adult obesity rate in the country at 37.4%. Arkansas is one of three states, along with Alaska and Oregon, to experience statistically significant increases in their adult obesity rates between 2022 and 2023. No state had a statistically significant decline in its obesity rate during that period.

This year’s report includes a featured section on the nation’s food environment and factors that affect food consumption patterns and the eventual impacts of those patterns on obesity. These factors include:

• The country’s changing food supply, including the increasing presence of ultra-processed foods over the last few decades. The report’s authors cite a 2023 study which estimated that three-quarters of the U.S. food supply was ultra-processed.
• The role of local food systems, including access challenges in rural and economically deprived communities and affordability challenges such as the often higher cost of healthier foods and recent price increases due to inflation.
• The advertising of foods to consumers through social media and digital platforms, significantly influencing consumer choices and often promoting unhealthy options. Targeted advertising, particularly toward Black and Hispanic communities, has been shown to contribute to disparities in unhealthy food consumption and raises concerns about the health impacts on vulnerable populations.

The report includes several recommendations for policies that could be adopted at the federal, state, and local levels to address obesity-related challenges. Some examples include:

• Advancing health equity by strategically dedicating federal resources to efforts that reduce obesity-related disparities, including increasing funding for the CDC’s chronic disease and obesity prevention programs and instituting economic policies that reduce poverty at a population level.
• Decreasing nutrition insecurity while improving the nutritional quality of food by maintaining the progress of the final 2024 school nutrition meal standards and working to fully align them with science-based recommendations.
• Changing the marketing and pricing strategies that lead to health disparities by closing tax loopholes and eliminating business-cost deductions for advertising unhealthy food to children.
• Discouraging unhealthy food and drink options by enacting sugar-sweetened beverage taxes.
• Making physical activity and the built environment safer and more accessible for all by increasing federal education funding to support health and physical education in schools and adopting and implementing the principles of the Complete Streets program.
• Working within the healthcare system to reduce disparities and close gaps in clinic-to-community settings by increasing access to health insurance through Medicaid, making marketplace insurance more affordable, and requiring Medicare and Medicaid to cover obesity-related services such as nutrition counseling and obesity treatment.

Arkansas Act 1220 of 2003 spearheaded initiatives to address obesity among school-age children and adolescents in the state. Under the law, which has been amended over the years, public schools are required to collect height and weight measurements for every student beginning in kindergarten and continuing in each even-numbered grade thereafter (a provision in the law allows parents to opt out). These measurements are used to determine each student’s BMI and the student’s BMI percentile, i.e. how the student’s BMI compares to other children of the same gender and age.

ACHI collects and analyzes this information, publishing an Arkansas BMI state report annually. Our most recent report, which covers the 2022-23 school year, indicates that approximately 24% of Arkansas public school children are classified as obese, 17% are classified as overweight, 7% of are classified as having a healthy weight, and 2% are classified as underweight.