Obesity

OBESITY

Obese people are responsible for their weight, and the time has come that we try to indoctrinate these people and do something about it. Obesity is on the rise, and is becoming an egregious national health concern. According to VanItallie and Simopoulos, obesity affects more than one-third of the population, and after cigarette smoking, is the second largest cause of death in the United States (1-2). With obesity becoming more and more of an irrefutable problem each year, the American population is going to suffer from a catastrophic health emergency. Obesity is a heath condition where the subjects have an abnormally large amount of fat for their height. A person who has a Body Mass Index (BMI) of over 30 is classified obese by the U.S. Dietary Guidelines (Nancy Nugent 24). Obesity is believed to be caused by many different things including junk foods, genetics, and not getting enough physical activity. Whatever the symptoms, we truly need to try and help obliterate this inscrutable problem.

Obesity affects one-third of all Americans. However, the highest percentage of obese people can be found in the lower class (Kallen and Sussman 17). The people that live below the poverty level typically eat more cheaply, highly processed, high-calorie foods. Overweight and obesity result from an energy imbalance in the body. This involves eating too many calories and not getting enough physical activity. Americans have never had a less active lifestyle than they do now in the Twentieth Century. High calorie foods are more easily available today than ever before. Obesity is a widely spread nutritional disorder that can affect anybody at any age, majority of the reason being because there are so many fast food restaurants at just about every corner. With its low prices people are not going to be making the right decisions in what type of food they consume in their diet. Some examples of “the junk food” would be: microwave dinners, hamburgers, french fries, grilled cheese, pop tarts, potato chips, sodas, and Hostess products which have high calories. Fast foods are not necessarily “the junk foods” that make people obese and fat. Too many carbohydrates and foods with lots of starch in an individual’s diet can also cause them to gain undesired weight, such a coffee. However, it is not always someone’s dietary decision that makes him or her obese. Genetics can play a monumental factor in a person’s weight (VanItallie and Simopoulos 12).

Recent findings show the importance of genetic factors as a major influence in the nature of obesity. Aggressive, medically supervised interventions, such as very-low-calorie diets (VLCDs) and surgical treatments, are especially needed for genetically susceptible individuals who do not respond to low-risk dieting or cannot maintain a healthy body weight despite multiple attempts to lose weight (Nancy Nugent 27). A model is needed to incorporate these obesity treatment guidelines into an everyday clinical physician practice. However, obesity treatments remain controversial, and only surgical therapies have patient volume and appropriate follow-up adequate to prove effectiveness.

Today’s challenge in health care is to prevent or diagnose, treat, and manage acute or chronic diseases that affect many people while controlling cost, maintaining standards of care, and improving quality of life. Obesity is one such treatable disease because of its association with physical, psychosocial, and disability costs that affect quality of life (Nancy Nugent 30). For the severely obese, it is a chronic, heterogeneous, multisystemic disease that has many equivocal causes and consequences. The usual reaction of people when an extremely obese person is spotted is that they tend to laugh or make zany remarks, and when they have a satirical personality they would have the nerve to look at the person with revulsion. Some overweight people handle stress by eating, which in fact put them in that situation in the first place. This disrespectful attitude of the people does not help the case it only makes it more marred. If we were to ask someone how it feels to be obese, the given reply would probably be that they feel unattractive, and have low self-esteem because they feel defamed, which can cause an indirect mental illness. This mental illness in some cases may lead to the person becoming so down and depressed that they may make an attempt and sometimes be successful in committing suicide.

Being obese also puts the person at risk of developing sicknesses and diseases like, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes (type 2), and some forms of cancer (prostate, breast and bowel.) In some cases obese people presume that it is the fast food restaurants are to blame for the problem. The restaurants have a simple argument to that, which is that they are not responsible for the individual’s decision to refuse to eat the dietary foods on the menu, which is provided for all. Some say the government should take charge of the situation like in the cases of seatbelt and smoking laws.

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