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According to a recent study by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC), more than 1 in 4 US people are fat.

The obesity rate has dramatically increased over the past few years. The figures show that in 2005 there were 23.9 percent obese adults which jumped to 25.6 percent in 2007. It should be interesting to note that it doesn’t include people who are overweight.

A different CDC survey—a gold-standard project in which researchers actually weigh and measure survey respondents—put the adult obesity rate at 33 percent for adult men and 35 percent for adult women in 2005 and 2006.

Dr. Robert Kushner, professor of medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine gave his opinion on obesity:

It’s alarming. As a country, it means we have a whole population of individuals developing increased risk for chronic illness—diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, cancer. All of these are related to obesity.

Obesity is a disease in which excess body fat has accumulated to such an extent that health may be negatively affected. It is commonly defined as a body mass index (weight divided by height squared) of 30 kg/m2 or higher. This distinguishes it from being overweight as defined by a BMI of between 25-29.9.

In Illinois, 24.9 percent of adults were obese in 2007, up from 24.3 percent in 2005. That compares to about 10 to 14 percent of adults in the state in 1990. As a region, the Midwest (25.3 percent) stands just behind the South (27 percent) as housing the most obese adults in the U.S.

The CDC study which is published in latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report provides the latest state-by-state data from the agency’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.