Thirty-one percent of Americans are getting adequate amounts of exercise -- that's moderate exercise for 30 minutes, five times a week. Some 40 percent do none at all, according to the CDC's National Health Interview Survey. That leaves another 29 percent who get active, but not often enough.
On the other hand, most Americans -- 60 percent -- are regular drinkers, which could be anywhere from one drink a year to two drinks a day for adult men. Whites with post-secondary education and high incomes are most likely to imbibe, while nearly 50 percent of Asian men and 60 percent of Asian women abstain entirely.
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The poll results confirmed other studies that found a jump in the number of Americans who are overweight.
Twenty percent of those polled had engaged in "binge drinking," by consuming five or more drinks in one day, at least once over the past year.
The national survey polled 79,000 Americans, ages 18 and up, from 2005 to 2007. The results were released this week.
The poll results reconfirmed other studies that found the number of overweight Americans has jumped. The CDC's last survey, released in 1997, found that 35 percent of adults were overweight. The new survey finds that 68 percent of men and 53 percent of women weigh too much.
The good news in the results is that fewer Americans are smoking. Twenty-percent are regular smokers, several percentage points down from the last survey, and 58 percent have smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime.
Smoking rates have dropped 5 percent since 1997, according to CDC data, but the agency had hoped to see the habit's popularity dwindle to 12 percent of the population by this year.
"We are a long way from where the health experts want us to be with smoking -- one in five is way above national health goals," Charlotte Schoenborn, a CDC statistician, told USA Today.
The same is true for physical activity rates, which have held steady -- and remained too low -- since the last CDC survey in 1997, despite new research into the myriad health benefits of exercise and increased pro-exercise advocacy by federal health agencies.
Americans are not working out, but sleep isn't what's taking up those extra hours: Six out of 10 respondents reported getting at least seven hours of sleep, but the rest of those polled are getting by on insufficient rest. The rates are on par with those from prior surveys, according to the CDC report.
