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Guthy Renker Corporation


An Enlarging Crisis; Obesity in the United States


In the past few years, everybody has been hearing more about the results of being overweight. Things have been getting steadily worse for the last twenty years, but we are just realizing it. The country with the greatest obesity ratio in the world is America. The number of fat adolescents and grown-ups has grown by 100% in the past quarter century. In 2004, 17% of the total kids were overweight and 32% of the total adults over 20 were obese. This means the amount of people who are endangering their health by being too large ranges in the millions. The prevalence of obesity continues to rise in America as well as other places and is now one of the biggest health threats in the country. What happened to make us all so big? This general increase in size has many contributing environmental factors that are now thought of as the American way of life.

Americans started to change factors of daily activity that made them less active in the 1980's. The first was the eating habits. Meals that used to be eaten at home and prepared by the women are now more and more often consumed in restaurants and quick service chains. Fast food portions that were standard in earlier years are two to three times larger in today's competitive restaurants. Fast food chains like the McDonald's restaurant have have had a lot of criticizing for their extra large high calorie sodas and french fries in the past, but a cheeseburger served in Most of today's most common restaurants may be over double the size of a McDonald's Big Mac, with an amount of fries to match this unhealthy meal. Only one of these extra large meals can be a person's entire day's required calories.

BMI, or body mass index is what we use to measure obesity. The risk for having serious health conditions raises as ones BMI raises. The three main levels of obesity are mild obesity with a BMI of 30+, morbid obesity at BMI 40+, and malignant obesity with a BMI of 50+. An average human has half the risk of getting a life threatening health problem than an obese individual who is 40% overweight. Currently, obesity is responsible for the deaths of an estimated 112,000 Americans a year. The risk of a heart attack, stroke, cancer, liver disease, and diabetes are just some of the possible conditions that come along with being overweight. breathing problems, swollen legs, and depression.

Most of us have an inactive life, another major cause of obesity. Nowadays, even if it is an easy walk, many Americans will take our cars. Busy lifestyles and hectic work hours make it difficult for most of us to allocate the time to work out. As technology has become more available more jobs are getting less physically active. Because many Americans will work somewhere on a computer everyday and not have any physical exercise all day because they are exhausted from their job.

Wealth and abundance is another big reason that seems to link to obesity. As people in wealthy nations get more and more wealth, the need or concern to conserve is lowered steadily. Bigger and more varied choices are now offered to children as opposed to a generation or two back when a family's income would control this. With parents that eat out constantly due to excess income allows them to show their kids form their earliest age unhealthy eating habits with rich, unhealthy restaurant foods. The U.S. Makes nearly 3times more food than U.S. residents consume, so the majority of people don't care where or how their food is produced and go based on food cravings.

Whether overweight or not, you are still affected by the growing obesity rate. An estimated 275,000,000 dollars a year is what we are paying extra in air fares due to increased fuel charges to make up for the extra weight and lawsuits to widen passenger seats brought on by overweight people. An annual total of 78,500,000,000 dollars is the cost of treating the number of health problems started because of obesity, as it creates nearly 10% of all medical costs. Litigation with obese people became so common, the government even tried to create laws protecting food producers with the Cheeseburger bill of 2004.



Guthy Renker Corporation


More Weight Loss Articles:

Our Country's Expanding Obesity Situation
Our Country's Expanding Weight Problem
Our Nation's Expanding Obesity Situation
Our Country's Escalating Obesity Problem
A Growing Epidemic; Weight Gain in The Country
An Enlarging Crisis; Obesity in the United States
An Enlarging Issue; Obesity in Our Country
The Nation's Rising Weight Issue
The Nation's Expanding Obesity Issue
A Growing Epidemic; Obesity in America
A Spreading Issue; Weight Gain in the United States

 



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