Â鶹ŮÓÅ

It stands to reason that if you know you’re overweight or obese, and you know your extra pounds are unhealthy, that you’ve made a stab at losing weight. Right? Not so much anymore, new research shows. The proportion of American adults who were either overweight or obese has been growing steadily for decades, rising from about 53% a generation ago to roughly 66% more recently. (Healy, 3/7)

No single bag of chips or bacon burger will kill you unless you choke on it. But in the big picture — the very big picture — how we Americans eat does often send us to earlier graves, and a new study out of Tufts University quantifies just how deadly our diets may be.It estimates that over 318,000 deaths a year, or nearly half of American deaths from major "cardiometabolic" killers — heart disease, stroke and diabetes — were hastened by unhealthy eating. (Goldberg, 3/7)

Few Baby Boomers have been tested for the liver-damaging hepatitis C virus, despite recommendations that all members of that generation have the blood test at least once, new research suggests. The share of boomers who had the test barely budged in the two years after health authorities first recommended it for everyone born between 1945 and 1965, according to a report published Wednesday in American Journal of Preventive Medicine. (Painter, 3/8)

About one in four adults in the United States suffers from arthritis, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Vital Signs report published Tuesday. Of the 54 million people in the United States who have this debilitating condition, not all are elderly. About 60 percent of those with arthritis were between the ages of 18 and 64, that is, working age. Activity limitations from arthritis increased by 20 percent since 2002, the report found. Simple, everyday tasks, such as walking or lifting bags, are challenging for 24 million people affected by the condition in the United States. (Naqvi, 3/7)

Fifteen Democrats in Congress are seizing on momentum in the field of precision medicine, penning a letter Tuesday to Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price urging increased patient access to genetic testing. The letter was sent on the same day the Personalized Medicine Coalition hosted a congressional briefing, which featured Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, a Democrat. (Facher, 3/7)

NAACP training program is coming to Orlando this week to talk to the leaders of Orlando’s black churches about the importance of their institutions in tackling HIV infection in the African American community. Although rates of HIV infection have dropped over time, the virus continues to disproportionately affect African Americans in the U.S. and here in Central Florida. (Miller, 3/7)