Forever Healthy Program: Is Obesity becoming a major problem nowadays?

Thank you for using rssforward.com! This service has been made possible by all our customers. In order to provide a sustainable, best of the breed RSS to Email experience, we've chosen to keep this as a paid subscription service. If you are satisfied with your free trial, please sign-up today. Subscriptions without a plan would soon be removed. Thank you!

Hi everyone,

Let's talk about obesity. Obesity is a growing global health problem. Obesity is when someone is so overweight that it is a threat to their health. Obesity typically results from over-eating (especially an unhealthy diet) and lack of enough exercise. In our modern world with increasingly cheap, high calorie food (example, fast food — or "junk food"), prepared foods that are high in things like salt, sugars or fat, combined with our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, increasing urbanization and changing modes of transportation, it is no wonder that obesity has rapidly increased in the last few decades, around the world.

The World Health Organization (WHO) provides a number of facts on obesity, including that globally in 2005:

Approximately 1.6 billion adults (age 15+) were overweight
At least 400 million adults were obese
At least 20 million children under the age of 5 years are overweight globally in 2005.

The WHO also projected that by 2015, approximately 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese.

Obesity also affects the poor as well, due to things like marketing of unhealthy foods as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) highlights. "Restrictions in access to food determine two simultaneous phenomena that are two sides of the same coin: poor people are malnourished because they do not have enough to feed themselves, and they are obese because they eat poorly, with an important energy imbalance. The food they can afford is often cheap, industrialized, mass produced, and inexpensive."

The WHO that many low- and middle-income countries are now facing a "double burdern" of disease:

While they continue to deal with the problems of infectious disease and under-nutrition, at the same time they are experiencing a rapid upsurge in chronic disease risk factors such as obesity and overweight, particularly in urban settings.
It is not uncommon to find under-nutrition and obesity existing side-by-side within the same country, the same community and even within the same household.
This double burden is caused by inadequate pre-natal, infant and young child nutrition followed by exposure to high-fat, energy-dense, micronutrient-poor foods and lack of physical activity.

With obesity comes increasing risks of:

Cardiovascular disease (mainly heart disease and stroke) — already the world's number one cause of death, killing 17 million people each year.
Diabetes (type 2) — which has rapidly become a global epidemic.
Musculoskeletal disorders — especially osteoarthritis.
Some cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon).

In addition, childhood obesity is associated with a higher chance of premature death and disability in adulthood.

The WHO adds, "What is not widely known is that the risk of health problems starts when someone is only very slightly overweight, and that the likelihood of problems increases as someone becomes more and more overweight. Many of these conditions cause long-term suffering for individuals and families. In addition, the costs for the health care system can be extremely high."

In Europe, for example, the WHO's European regional body says that "obesity is already responsible for 2-8% of health costs and 10-13% of deaths in different parts of the Region."

The various causes of obesity

Taking a more global view, the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ) looks at various attempts to tackle obesity and notes that obesity is caused by a complex and multitude of inter-related causes, "fuelled by economic and psychosocial factors as well as increased availability of energy dense food and reduced physical activity."

a. Food systems causes of obesity

The main problem has been the increased availability of high energy food, because of:

Liberalized international food markets
Food subsidies that "have arguably distorted the food supply in favour of less healthy foodstuffs"
"Transnational food companies [that] have flooded the global market with cheap to produce, energy dense, nutrient empty foods"
"Supermarkets and food service chains [that are] encouraging bulk purchases, convenience foods, and supersized portions"
Healthy eating often being more expensive than less healthy options, (despite global food prices having dropped on average).
Marketing, especially "food advertising through television [which] aims to persuade individuals—particularly children—that they desire foods high in saturated fats, sugars, and salt."

b. The local environment and obesity

How people live, what factors make them active or sedentary are also a factor. For example:

"Research, mainly in high income countries, indicates that local urban planning and design can influence weight in several ways."
For example, levels of physical activity are affected by
- Connected streets and the ability to walk from place to place
- Provision of and access to local public facilities and spaces for recreation and play
The increasing reliance on cars leads to physical inactivity, and while a long-time problem in rich countries, is a growing problem in developing countries.

c. Social conditions and obesity

Examples of this are noted here:

"Working and living conditions, such as having enough money for a healthy standard of living, underpin compliance with national health guidelines"
"Increasingly less job control, security, flexibility of working hours, and access to paid family leave etc. undermines the material and psycho-social resources necessary for empowering individuals and communities to make healthy living choices."
Inequality, which can lead to different groups being disadvantaged and having less access to needed resources and healthier foods

When concluding this post, I want to thank you guys for reading this post. I hope you know the overrated methods that are always on TV commercials and documentaries to tackle obesity-exercise and be physically fit. These are interesting and frightening facts. That's all.

Goodbye!

(Courtesy:globalissues.org)