Recently I began a project of research on weight loss. So I sat down at my computer and Googled "weight loss." Bam, 103,000,000 hits in 0.41 seconds. I looked at a few and decided that I would look for blogs and in 0.18 seconds I had 19,500,000 blogs to check out. Not finished I checked out books on weight loss using Google, 65,848 in 0.26 seconds. Since Google offered so many books I went to Amazon.com to find out what books they offered on weight loss. Result 83,217 items. Books also provided me with CDs, tapes, DVDs etc. Including the book "Idiots guide to eating well after weight loss surgery," I had to laugh.
Why so many items, sites and blogs, can the market really be that big? Who's buying this stuff?
So I went to the CDC site and found that 23.7% of California (my healthy state) adults are obese. That means people twenty years old or older are 30% (or more) body fat. Today some say that California has a population that is 34% obese. That doesn't count the overweight group. So what happened. When I was young I remember see California as a healthy, fit or athletic state. In fact according to the CDC in 1985 <10% were obese. In 1988 we moved up to the 10-14% range and then in 1998 we bulked up to the 15-19% obese group.
It gets worse. In a 30-year study the CDC reported our US kids were also getting fat. In 1976 kids aged 2-5 years were only 5% obese but by 2006 the same group was 12.4% obese. The kids 6-10 years old grew from 6.5% in 1976 to 17% in 2006. Wow, that's almost three times the number of kids. Finally kids 12-19 years old went from 5% to 17.6 by 2006. That's more than three times the number of kids.
Now I know why Google had 103 Million sites on weight loss. That's one site for every three people in the US or 33% (that's about one for every obese American).
