Young adults, apparently believing they are immune from risk, had large increases in smoking and obesity and had continued poor eating habits during the 1990s, according to surveys of more than 120,000 people.
The result may be higher future rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and lung disease as their generation ages, say Marilyn A. Winkleby, Ph.D., M.P.H., and Catherine Cubbin, Ph.D., of Stanford University, writing in the September/October issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion.
Older Hispanics and older black men showed decreases in these behaviors, the survey found.
The information was gathered from black, Hispanic and white women and men in 1990 and 2000 as part of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a telephone survey conducted by state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than one-third of white men and women ages 18 to 24 smoked, the highest rate among all the groups covered in the survey in 2000. Those young people and Hispanic women the same age produced the largest increases in smoking rates from 1990 to 2000.
“Not only is smoking increasing among selected young people, failure to quit smoking is also increasing in selected ethnic and racial groups,” the authors say. More than half of women and men ages 18 to 24 from all ethnic groups failed to quit smoking in 2000.
Smoking is especially worrisome, because it is the leading cause of preventable death and disability in the United States.
Obesity increased among every ethnic group, Winkleby and Cubbin say, and was especially a problem for black women.
“Almost 20 percent of black women were obese by ages 18 to 24, and this increased to over 35 percent by ages 25 to 44,” they say.
Contributing to obesity in all groups, between one-third and one-half of those surveyed ate fewer than three servings of fruit and vegetables a day, although older black men and older Hispanic men and women improved dramatically in that regard between 1990 and 2000.