It’s now classified as disease by the the American Medical Association.

In order to fight what it described as an obesity epidemic the AMA  voted at its annual meeting in Chicago to recognize obesity as a disease  and recommended a number of measures to fight it.

The AMA points out that obesity rates in the United States have doubled among adults in the last twenty years and tripled among children in a single generation.

Obesity is associated with a variety of diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers.