More servicemembers fighting battle of bulge

[unhappycamper]

More servicemembers fighting battle of bulge
By Sandra Jontz, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The percentage of active-duty troops who are overweight or obese has more than doubled since the start of the Iraq war in 2003, according to a recently released Pentagon study, with stress and return from deployments as the top reasons for weight gain.

For the study, military health officials reviewed servicemembers’ outpatient records from 1998 to 2008, using the Body Mass Index scale to determine which troops were overweight or obese.

For the first four years of the study, the number and percentage of overweight troops remained relatively stable, even dipping slightly in 2001. Since that time, however, the number of overweight troops has ballooned from about 25,000 in 2001 to nearly 70,000 in 2008, according to the review, contained in the January edition of the Defense Department’s Medical Surveillance Monthly Report.

"In the past decade among active military members in general, the percent of military members who experience medical encounters for overweight/obesity has steadily increased," according to the report’s editorial comment section. "Since 2003, rates of increase have generally accelerated."

In 2003, the number of troops who were overweight/obese was about 1.75 percent of the active-duty population. Now, that number is 4.4 percent, or 68,786 troops. The biggest rate increase occurred between 2005 and 2007, when the percentage climbed from 2.9 percent to 4 percent.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=60623