A new study found that obesity in the United States is growing at an alarming rate, especially in the south, making America the most obese major country in the world.

Mississippi and West Virginia topped the scale, with an adult obesity rate of 35 percent, according to a report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released on Thursday.

Meanwhile, 18 other states, including most of the south, have obesity rates at or above 30 percent.

Only seven states--Vermont, Montana, Utah, California, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Colorado, along with the District of Columbia--has a registered obesity rate below 25 percent.

Colorado is currently the least obese state in the country, with a 21.3 percent, while Hawaii is the second least and has an obesity rate of 21.8 percent.

When broken down by race, blacks exceed 40 percent in 11 states, and 30 percent in 41 states, while whites have a rate higher than 30 percent in only 10 states. Latinos also outweigh whites with a rate greater than 30 percent in 23 states.

The results from the new study show that the epidemic of obesity has grown enormously since 1990, when all U.S. states had an obesity rate at 15 percent or below. By 2000, only Arizona and Colorado had obesity rates below 15 percent. Then in 2010, ten years later, not a single state had an obesity rate below 20 percent.

"This is a problem that doesn't have either a single solution or a single cause," noted Jeffrey Levi, Ph.D., executive director of Trust for America's Health, in a press conference, according to the Huffington Post. "But certainly, over the last 30 years, we've seen a dramatic increase in fast food outlets and our lifestyle changes ... in terms of what we're eating, the quality of what we're eating and where we're eating it, and [decreasing] physical activity levels."