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The poor are most likely to be fat, but the more affluent are closing the gap. Obesity is growing fastest among Americans who make more than $60,000 a year, researchers reported Monday.

"This is a very surprising finding," said Dr. Jennifer Robinson of the University of Iowa, whose study was presented at a meeting of the American Heart Association.

But it "underlines the whole complexity" of the obesity epidemic, she said.

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For years doctors have known that the people most likely to be overweight have the lowest incomes. Fresh produce and other healthful fare can be expensive as well as less accessible than fast food and other high-fat options in low-income neighborhoods.

Just last week a report criticized the government nutrition program that feeds millions of low-income women and children for, among other things, providing hardly any fresh produce and favoring high-calorie juice over fruit.

But even as the nation's obesity rates have soared since the 1970s, disposable income has, too, and Robinson wondered what role the extra change was having on waistlines.

She and graduate student Nidhi Maheshwari, who presented the findings, culled decades of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, one of the government's prime health databases, to compare obesity with family income.

In the early 1970s, 22.5 percent of people with incomes below $25,000 were obese. By 2002, 32.5 percent of the poor were, they found.

Just 9.7 percent of people with incomes above $60,000 were obese in the 1970s a figure that jumped to 26.8 percent in 2002.

For purposes of comparison, all the income figures were adjusted to reflect year 2000 dollars.

Money for quality food aside, higher-income people are thought to be better educated and to have better access to health care, so why such a jump among them? In an interview, Robinson said no one yet knows. But she speculated that longer commutes, growing popularity of restaurants and possibly longer work hours since the 1970s are playing a role.

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