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Hold onto your seat folks! You are in for a dose of some bumpy data!

A year to the day that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the pandemic a study came out. 3000 people were surveyed. The questions were about weight gain. Before the pandemic, 93 million adults in the US were already obese according to the CDC.

42% revealed that they gained more weight than they were comfortable with during our lockdown. That’s sort of expected. That’s why everyone keeps referring to the Quarantine 15. Fifteen pounds gained would have been bad enough, but reality really bites on this one. The average American adult actually gained 29 pounds during the last year. That’s astounding and scary.

Some people lost weight from the stress of the pandemic. and others gained. The average was 29 pounds. Ten percent admitted they’d gained over 50 pounds! And if you split off the millennials, guess how much they gained on average?

41 pounds.

We worked from home. That left us close to the refrigerator. That also left us dangerously close to the snack cupboard. Snack food companies are reporting double-digit sales increases and one thing I found interesting is the size of the bag of chips people are grabbing went up too. 10oz -18oz bags saw a whopping 87% increase in sales.

As the year went on, according to bakingbusiness.com the boldness of flavor choices got stronger too. Companies came out with flavors that touted things like “flaming” or “dill pickle” and people jumped on them. The more they needed comfort food the bolder their choices became. Well, the pandemic is not over. I sure hope we can get a handle on this!

For those who want to read the entire article put out by Marketwatch, here’s the link.

Cheers,