All Over the U.S., People Have Gained Weight During the COVID-19 Pandemic

If you’re like most Americans, the past year has been a time of fear, anxiety and often profound tedium—but also of worsening dietary habits. Take 328 million people and confine them to their homes for weeks and months on end and they’re going to start eating more and exercising less. That means, no surprise, weight gain. A study published March 22 in JAMA took a crack at determining just how many pounds the average American packed on in between February and June 2020, and came up with about 7.08 lb. (3.24 kg). Even before the pandemic began, the researchers, all from the University of California, San Francisco, were involved in a program known as the Heart eHealth Study, in which 250,000 volunteers share their blood pressure, electrocardiograms, weight and more by entering them into a phone app or connecting the phone to Bluetooth-enabled devices if they own them. There is no set frequency with which the volunteers are expected to participate, but the more often they log on and contribute their readings, the more data the researchers can collect. The goal is to learn more about the lifestyles and patterns of underlying health that lead to heart disease and how it might be possible to reverse them before trouble starts. When, in mid-March and early-April of last year, 45 states issued shelter-in-place orders, it got the research team wondering about what the sudden shift to a more sedentary lifestyle would do to eating habits and body mass. To determine thi...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news