Obesity is an epidemic in Maine, and the rates are climbing.

It’s been five years since my husband, Phil, suffered his heart attack. Five years since I followed that ambulance down the Turnpike to Maine Medical Center, rushing him south for a rescue angioplasty. Five years since our children staggered off to high school that day, not knowing what was going on with Dad.

Since then, Phil and I have celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary with delight.

Our oldest has graduated from Union College.

Our youngest is taking a full load of nursing classes at the University of Southern Maine.

Phil is well.

And I think about his heart attack every day.

The cardiac “event” is not who Phil is or who I am, but it does define our lives.

We now spend less time on the couch and more time on our bikes, on a run or in the pool. We eat better, deal with stress differently and have better lives. Each of us has participated in a handful of triathlons, and Phil is a regular in the Beach to Beacon.

I give almost full credit to our change in lifestyle to the Sun Journal’s Heartbeat 2001 project, but it was the heart attack that locked in our commitment to lives of fitness and good nutrition.

In 2001, when the Sun Journal embarked on Heartbeat, the newspaper’s goal was to raise awareness about cardiovascular disease because Maine – and Androscoggin County in particular – boasted one of the highest rates of heart disease and death in the nation. I thought the effort of our staff to report the bad news and collaborate with health care providers to reverse that trend would change the world. OK, maybe not the world, but certainly pockets of our readership area.

I thought that the information we gathered and presented to our readers would shake them up as much as it shook me up. I thought the mountain of evidence we presented about how poor lifestyle choices contribute to cardiovascular disease and early death would transform even the most sedentary couch potatoes, that smokers would crush their butts, families would pump up consumption of fruits and vegetables and teenagers would enter adulthood in fit condition.

Looking at Mainers’ health from a purely statistical perspective over the past couple of weeks proves I was just plain wrong.

Maine’s smoking rate is certainly shrinking, but that happy downward trend had started long before 2001, thanks to the concerted effort of thousands of public health advocates. The rates of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol are climbing, and that’s been a discouraging discovery as we’ve taken a fresh look at Maine’s cardiovascular health (see story on A1).

Heartbeat 2001 was not a waste of time and I’m sure that some readers did take seriously the information we published and made changes in their personal lives, but the project didn’t produce the sea of change I had hoped and worked so hard for.

What I found especially disturbing is that Americans actually believe we are in better shape now than a decade ago.

When asked in 1995 whether they enjoyed very good health, 28.7 percent of adults said they did. In 2005, despite concrete science to the contrary, 37.3 percent of adults said they were in very good health.

They’re not.

The rates of Type II diabetes – directly linked to carrying around extra weight – are climbing, and many people remain undiagnosed. High blood pressure and high cholesterol are on the rise, although there are pills we can pop to help get these risk factors under control, and too many people are eating excessively more than they need to survive and are just not exercising at a rate to maintain well-conditioned hearts.

I know I sound like a nag and this may seem like tired news, but what I may think is mild compared to Dr. Dora Anne Mills’ viewpoint.

Obesity is an epidemic – defined as rapid spreading of disease – in Maine, which is significant because obesity is at the root of every other risk factor for cardiovascular disease. The cardiac danger doesn’t wait until middle age, it’s popping up in children and, according to Mills, if Mainers don’t systematically tackle obesity as we have with smoking and other killers, “our youth may be the first generation to not live as long as their parents’ generation.”

That warning, intended to frighten, is genuinely sad.

Cardiovascular disease kills too many good people now, and kills them before they have lived full lives. That the trend could get worse and start killing Mainers at younger ages can not be the future we wish on our children.