The Guardian has posted this article on obesity in America. Surprise, surprise: Americans are fat. Everybody knows. But not just them, and not just in the "old" way. The start of the article:

West Virginia is used to indignity. Its Appalachian hills are a byword for poverty and its people derided as hillbillies.

Now insult has been added to injury in what will be seen as an unwelcome first in the history of the United States.

A team of federal "disease detectives", normally sent to combat outbreaks of infectious bugs, has been dispatched to the state to chart its frightening obesity epidemic. Epidemiologists from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) have never before been deployed in this fashion, and it reflects the growing anxiety about the threat obesity poses to the health of the nation as a whole.

And, from the end of this article, a few bits of crazy facts:

In the US the percentage of young overweight people has more than tripled since 1980. Some 16% of children and teens are considered overweight with childhood obesity growing at the rate of 20% a year. Some 30% of adults, more than 60 million people, are obese - one in three women and more than one in four men.

Throughout the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 4.5kg (10lb). The extra weight meant airlines burnt 350m more gallons of fuel in 2000, costing an extra £157m.

Americans eat 200 calories more food energy per day than they did 10 years ago. On any given day, 30% of American children aged four to 19 eat fast food. Overall, 7% of the US population visits McDonald's each day, and 20%-25% eat in some kind of fast-food restaurant.