Obesity rates in the U.S. military surged during the coronavirus pandemic and its associated lockdowns, data released Sunday details.
AP reports in the Army alone, nearly 10,000 active duty soldiers developed obesity between February 2019 and June 2021, pushing the rate to nearly a quarter of the troops studied. Increases were seen in the U.S. Navy and the Marines, too.
“The Army and the other services need to focus on how to bring the forces back to fitness,” said Tracey Perez Koehlmoos, director of the Center for Health Services Research at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland, who led the research.
Overweight and obese troops are more likely to be injured and less likely to endure the physical demands of their profession meaning the pandemic pounds will now have to come off.
U.S. Army trainees participating in the Army’s new Future Soldier Prep Course stretch during a physical training session at Fort Jackson on September 28, 2022 in Columbia, South Carolina. The course is a pre-basic training improvement camp for those wanting to join the Army but who have not yet qualified due to excess body fat or low academic test scores. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The military loses more than 650,000 workdays each year because of extra weight and obesity-related health costs exceed $1.5 billion annually for current and former service members and their families, federal research shows.
Military leaders have been warning about the impact of obesity on the U.S. military for more than a decade, according to AP, but the lingering pandemic effects highlight the need for urgent action, said retired Marine Corps Brigadier General Stephen Cheney, who co-authored a recent report on the problem.
“The numbers have not gotten better,” Cheney said in a November webinar held by the American Security Project, a nonprofit think tank. “They are just getting worse and worse and worse.”
As Breitbart News reported, weight gain across the broader community was widely seen during the lockdowns.
A survey in 2021 of 3,000 U.S. adults shows 42 percent gained an average of 29 unwanted pounds during the pandemic and have since struggled to return to their former size.
In total, 61 percent of American adults reported unwanted weight gain or loss, while 42 percent of those 61 percent reported weight gain.
The reports of unprecedented weight gain across the services comes as the Army this week admitted it was having problems recruiting and announced an unprecedented reduction in its numbers that would shrink the active duty Army to its smallest size since World War II.
The biggest enlistment disqualifying factors are obesity, fitness and mental health issues.