It’s not news that Americans have been packing on the pounds, but a new CDC report puts that weight gain into eye-opening perspective: The average US woman now weighs as much as an average man did in the early 1960s, while the average 2015 man weighs almost as much as 1.5 women from the 1960s. Women have gained an average of more than 26 pounds, up from 140 to just over 166 pounds. In the same timespan, the average man has put on nearly 30 pounds, going from about 166 pounds to 195.5 today.
According to an earlier analysis published in BMC Public Health, Americans are now the world’s third heaviest people, behind only Tonga and Micronesia in the Pacific. The average American weighs 33 pounds more than the average French person and 70 pounds more than a typical Bangladesh resident. As the Washington Post put it, to add up to a ton of total body weight it would take 20 Bangladeshis but only 12.2 Americans.