Why Americans BeCome Overwheight

Abstract

Rates of obesity among children and adults are increasing worldwide. This is a complex disorder that spreads significantly in recent years, thus becoming a major health problem. A great number of studies are held annually to detect what exactly induce obesity. Such aspects as high availability of unhealthy processed fast foods, poor neighborhoods with lack of parks and playgrounds for active lifestyles for children; media, which increasing their advertisements of junk food and revealing snack patterns amongst people, making the particular accent on children and adolescents and so on play an important role in getting obese. Moreover, not only nurtural, but also genetic factors can outgrow to adiposity, for instance slow metabolism, bunch of syndromes or intake of certain medications. Researchers from all fields, psychologists, sociologists, physicians do the best to define, predict and cease this morbidity, which in it's term lead to more severe illnesses, such as diabetes mellitus type II, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, sleep apnea and much more. The conjunction of both nurtural and natural factors discussed in these articles can GET TO THE POINT for preventing the issue of obesity.

Why Americans Are Becoming So Overweight

Obesity is caused when too much accumulation of fat occurs in the body. A person is normally considered obese when his or her weight is 20% over the normal body-weight for height and age and the Body Mass Index (BMI) measures 30 or more. Obesity has always existed in human populations, but until very recently was comparatively rare. According to the last statistics provided by the Centers for Disease Control, rates of obesity raised from 14 percent in 1990 on more than 10 percent during the next 10 years, and moreover kept raising and reached the minimum of 25 percent in the year of 2010, meanwhile about one fourth of the states in America reported that the obesity is beyond 30 percent.

Obesity may be caused by a number of social, cultural, physiological, metabolic and genetic factors that sometimes are out of person's control. Symptoms of adiposity may show up in the form of visible excess accumulation of fat, troubles in breathing, insulin resistance, increase in size or number of fat cells (lipocytes), rise in blood pressure, and high cholesterol levels.

"There is no single, simple answer to explain the obesity patterns" Rachel Pomerance cites the words of Walter Willett in her article "Why We're So Fat: What's Behind the Latest Obesity Rates" (p. 1). Unable to find exact cause of this morbidity, scientists and physicians developed variety of treatments for obesity that includes diet and behavior therapy to medicine and surgery. Those treatments usually depend on the levels of BMI, while others may be an individual choice. While diet therapy involves a prescribed diet and exercise plan, behavior therapy teaches new behaviors that promote weight loss. If a person's condition demands so, a doctor may recommend a combination of both. For a person having a BMI of 40 or a BMI of 35 to 39.9 accompanied by serious medical problems, doctors usually recommend gastrointestinal surgery. Although, it's hard to blame what causes obesity, the genetic and environmental influences both will be discussed in this paper.

NATURE

The primary reason that induces the increase of overweight people in America is an inactive way of living. Population uses cars much more, than simple walking, for instance. Going to the stores or to the restaurants, that sometimes just in 10 minutes of walking, driving a car is a common occurrence nowadays. Moreover, as The New York Times publishes "Researchers found that labor saving devices had reduced a person's energy use by over 100 calories a day … half the difference in energy use was due to less walking" ("Weight Control-In-Depth Report-NY Times Health", p. 3). In general, the lifestyle of a common American is a work-home-work-home basis, without any additional activities that can burn extra calories that were eaten during the day. There are also a lot of people use elevators as I've noticed in our college, instead of just walking by stairs on the second floor. Noone is using stairs in city buildings also. The lack of physical activities from the very childhood exposes adolescents to a tremendous risk to grow up obese. This statement proves "Janssen and his colleagues (2005) found that TV viewing was associated with being overweight" (as cited in Fleming, p. 6).

The influence of media on the development of the obesity amongst childhood is largely discussed in the article "Policy Statement-Children, Adolescents, Obesity, and the Media" by Dr. Victor C. Strasburger. He states that TV viewing firstly drives out usual children activities, secondly advertisements of unhealthy fast food lead to pernicious habits of adverse eating habits, such as snacking, and lastly it may be a reason of abnormal sleep practice. Dr. Strasburger argues that according to longitudinal studies it was proved that TV watching on weekends led to the increasing of BMI amongst people while they reached their 30s. And research held on 2003 which results were published in the article "Weight Control- In-Depth Report " show that "the risk for obesity increases by 23% and for type 2 diabetes by 14%" ("NY Times Health", p.3). Thus, it's not directly TV viewing leads to obesity, but the patterns or habits that accompany it. On the example of the study that was held in New York has been found that "teenagers with a bedroom TV spent more time watching TV, less time being physically active, ate fewer family meals, had greater consumption of sweetened beverages, and ate fewer vegetables than did teenagers without a bedroom TV" (Strasburger, 2011, p. 202). The same problem of contributing media and television into increase of adiposity was announced in the work "Weight Control- In-Depth Report", asserting that watching TV on regular basis is "the most hazardous pastime"("NY Times Health", p.3).

Another outstanding problem that captures the whole world day-by-day is the spreading of fast food restaurants, whose meal is also called junk food, and it's very properly. It includes a very harmful oily fried food, huge sandwiches and hamburgers that contain a lot of calories and saturated fats, dangerous coke and all those kind of sodas and sweetened juices. It's worth to be noted that everything served in large portions, and restaurants tend to increase it, "supersize" the servings (typical promotions in McDonalds). Not small roles play all those allegedly "diet" sodas, "low-fat" milk, sweeteners and all these substitutes