"The most serious health problem in the United States today is obesity." Sounds familiar, doesn't it? In fact, that very common claim that one might be forgiven for what is the most recent statement of centers for the Disease Control and prevention, or the American Medical Association or the Academy of Pediatrics or, perhaps, Maria Kang. Moreover, the Declaration is undoubtedly true, as the medical, financial and social consequences of the epidemic of obesity in the United States grow ever clearer - and more frightening.
But that pronouncement about the primacy of the obesity in the hierarchy of national health problems is not new. In fact, it is line of opening for a notable article in LIFE magazine for 60 years. Here, as the national dialogue by the crisis of obesity in the United States grows more urgent, LIFE.com presents images - many of whom never ran in the magazine - made by the photographer Martha Holmes to illustrate an article of March 1954 entitled (something offensively to the modern ear), "The scourge of overweight".
"Some 5 million Americans", wrote life, "medically considered to 'obese', they weigh at least 20% more than normal and, consequently, have a mortality rate one-and-a half times greater than its neighbours..." Another 20 million Americans are classified as overweight (10% above normal) by doctors and insurance men and are dramatically prone to diabetes, gallstones, hernia, renal deficiencies and bladder and complications during pregnancy and surgery."
[More: see all coverage of obesity of TIME.com.]
The figures given for life – numbers, is noteworthy, that they were the result of significantly different research cited in reports and revised papers today - they have grown rapidly to proportions even more atrocious: according to a report by the CDC 2013, "more than one third of adult Americans (35.7%) and approximately 17% (or 12.5 million) of children and adolescents aged 2 to 19 years are obese".
But perhaps more surprising and troubling statistics on obesity in the United States is related to the speed with which has strengthened this affliction: for example, in 2010 (again according to the CDC), "there were 12 States with a prevalence of obesity of 30%. In the year 2000, States had a prevalence of obesity of 30% or more."
(There have been some glimmers of hope in this sad litany. Display, a February 2014 by the CDC report found that the rate of obesity in children 2 to 5 fell 40 percent during a period of eight years, about 14 percent in 2004 to about 8 percent in 2012.)
Try to imagine the toll that obesity on the health of men, women and children and in the economy of the nation as a whole. The more we will pay for insurance each year because of this epidemic? How much economic productivity will be lost because of illness, injury, emergency room visits, hospitalizations and other collateral damage of the immediate damage and long-term obesity?
Article of life, meanwhile, focused at least in part a woman, Dorothy Bradley, whose struggles with eating & body image issues were familiar, and still familiar, countless American men and women.
"When he finished high school in Tyner, Tennessee, in 1940," life said that its readers, "5 feet 5 inch Dorothy Bradley weighed 205 pounds and fit snugly into a graduation size 44 matronly dress. "She had overeaten since the moment she began to mature, possibly because of unconscious emotional turmoil".
The article chronicled the efforts of Dorothy to lose weight; your desire to work in medicine; its successes (lose 60 pounds) and its decline (gaining all back and then some); and ultimately, something of a happy ending, as it has lost and, after the publication of the article, had kept out of about 70 pounds and got a job as a nurse at a hospital in Kentucky.
-Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
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