People react as they ride an escalator on the London Underground during the “No Trousers Tube Ride” in London, Britain on January 7, 2024. (Photo by Hollie Adams/Reuters)

“The most serious health problem in the U.S. today is obesity.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But that pronouncement about obesity’s primacy in the hierarchy of national health problems is not new. Rather, it’s the opening line to a remarkable article published 60 years ago in LIFE magazine. This photographs made by Martha Holmes to illustrate that March 1954 article, titled “The Plague of Overweight.” Photo: Dorothy Bradley (left), photographed for LIFE magazine article on obesity, 1949. (Photo by Martha Holmes/Time & Life Pictures)

Frances Fowler leads the Bowie VFD Marching Thoroughbreds in the Bowie 4th of July Parade in Bowie, Md., on July 4, 1976. (Photo by James M. Thresher/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Three female friends dancing in nightclub. (Photo by Cultura Creative (RF)/Alamy Stock Photo )

A woman walks on the stairs decorated with an image of two hands shaking to form the shape of the Korean Peninsula to support the upcoming inter- Korean summit, in downtown Seoul on September 17, 2018. South Korean President Moon Jae- in will fly to the North Korean capital on September 18, for his third summit with the North' s leader Kim Jong Un as a rapid diplomatic thaw takes hold on the peninsula despite stalled progress in denuclearisation talks between Pyongyang and Washington. (Photo by Jung Yeon-je/AFP Photo)

Pittsburgh police officers stand near a Port Authority bus that had fallen into a sinkhole along 10th Street and Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh on Monday, October 28, 2019. The bus and a car fell in the sinkhole shortly before 8 a.m. One person was taken to the hospital for a minor injury. (Photo by Kristina Serafini/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review via AP Photo)

A participant smiles at the annual Christopher Street Day parade on Kurfuerstendamm in Berlin, Germany, June 27, 2015. (Photo by Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters)

Revellers take part in the Els Enfarinats festival, in the town of Ibi near Alicante, Spain, Saturday December 28, 2019. For about 200-years the inhabitants of Ibi annually celebrate with a battle using flour, eggs and firecrackers, outside the city town hall. (Photo by Alberto Saiz/AP Photo)