Obesity has always been a big headache around the world, especially in the United States. During the past 15 years, there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States and the rate is still remained very high. Obesity is defined as an unhealthy excess of body fat, which increases the risk of medical illnesses. Although a lot of solutions had been used to reduce these number but the number of people who are becoming overweight or obese is still increasing in a significant rate; obese is becoming more and more contagious in the U.S community nowadays. Right now, the only solution that can help controlling this is by putting all the overweight/obese people into living within the skim communities, where healthy people are living, by the year of 2015.
Obesity’s relation to many types of cancers has been studied and testified very carefully; people with insufficient physical activities but with higher weight gain would have a higher risk to kidney, colon, and postmenopausal breast cancer. Trentham-Dietz A and his colleagues, who are all from the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center, have together conducted an experiment to find out if there is a relationship between the weight change and the risk of postmenopausal breast cancer. Their results showed that weight gain in women since ages 18 and 35 years was associated with increased postmenopausal breast cancer risk, however, the risk was lower in women who had lost weight. Although a lot of studies like this have successfully been done but obesity is still here in the United States. According to a study of Ogden CL, Carroll MD and their colleagues, in 2003-2004, more than 17.1% of US children and adolescents were overweight and about 32.2% of adults were obese. In 2010, the number of states had a prevalence of obesity less than 20% is 0. About thirty-six states had a prevalence of 25% or more; this is according to the U.S. Obesity Trends.
Despite the fact that the numbers of relative health problems that people could get from being obese are indefinite, many people still do not believe or even know that obesity is a big problem. It is true that doctors and physicians can easily recognize obesity as a health relative problem, but they will not talk with their patients about that at all. According to the STOP Obesity Alliance surveys, only 39 percent of obese people surveyed had ever been told by a health care provider that they were obese. The surveys also say that the main reason why this is occurring is because often, the doctors don’t know what to say or how to say it to their patients. This lack of important communications between the doctors and the obese patients will result in the lack of obesity’s information for the obese people and create a more devastating situation in the United States.
Also, another way that lack of obesity’s information can be occurred is the loss of technology’s knowledge in obese people who are in the older ages. Nowadays, new technologies, new types of machines are invented day-after-day, for the group of younger ages, this means nothing to them because they can easily be adaptable to those new stuffs, however, for those people who are at the older ages, these new technologies can be seem very difficult to them, and they prefer not to use the new stuffs. Researchers found that older adults feel less confident about their computer knowledge than younger adults; they tend to have the thought that they will embarrass themselves when performing computer skills in front of the younger people because of their memory problems. However, most of the obesity’s facts, such as its background information, its prevention, and treatments…are all on the Internet now, the new “stuffs”, like this website provided by the government about obesity: PubMed Health. And that is the main reason why the number of older people becoming obese had doubled up in the past 10 years. According to Dennis T Villareal’s article, “In 1991, 14.7% of persons in the United States who were 60–69 y of age and 11.4% of those who were >70 y old were obese . In 2000, the prevalence of obesity in these age groups increased to 22.9% and 15.5%, respectively, which represents increases of 56% and 36%, respectively, in <10”. Many of those obese people will not know if they are obese or not, or even understand what obesity really is and why it is a big problem right now. They might argue: “Oh, obesity? I know that! But that’s not a big problem, or even a problem at all! You want to see examples? Look at me, I’m still healthy, does not have any health relative problems, and am having a wonderful life. I’m very happy with it!” and if they are one of the obese people, without the knowledge of the obesity’s consequences, they will say: “Hey, are you people trying to do another state of segregation again? Between us being considered “fat people” and those “skim healthy people”? That isn’t fair, you know!” Despite the country’s efforts in trying to prove that obesity is a big problem right now, these obese people will keep on holding their grounds and being stubborn on agreeing with the facts.
In response to that, the people on the other side of the problem, scientists/doctors for example, who believe that obesity is a factual problem will reply with their best knowledge: “Well, how do you know that you are not obese and don’t have any health problems? Have you gone to your physician yet? Or are you just guessing? According to a recent study, in 10 American people, there are 3 to 4 of them are obese. That means about one-third of the United States’ population are obese” And another reply like: “I know that you are happy with your life right now but did you consider how your life will be like when you get older because of obesity and getting those health problems? Obesity is a long-term process”, “We are not segregating anybody, we do this because we CARE about your health, we want you to be healthy!” By using some of the facts in the conversation, these responses will surely scare those obese people a little bit and change their thoughts about obesity and start thinking about what they could do to stop this problem.
Another group that will oppose to this problem is the fast food companies who need to make profits on selling food mostly to those obese people, and also a lot of people believe that fast food restaurants are the cause of obesity, those are maybe the main reasons why they oppose to this problem, saying that obesity is not a big problem. Those fast food companies include Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), and the big one McDonald’s. In September 2011, McDonald’s profit has climbed 8.6% according to the Yahoo News. In recent years, these fast food companies had added some of the healthy food into their menus, such as salads, low-fat milks... in order to cover their grounds from those widespread and inconclusive discussions about their food. They might argue: “It’s definitely not our faults for making other people become obese! We are just making food, serving our customers with the best. It’s their rights to choose what to eat, what to drink. We are just doing our business here!”
Fast food might not be the main cause of obesity but it might have caused at least some of the increase in the obesity rates. According to a study of Janet Currie and her colleagues about the effect of fast food restaurants on obesity, it shows that the presence of a fast food restaurant within a tenth of a mile of a school is associated with at least a 5.2 percent increase in the obesity rate in that school. And with the information from the top of this essay, obesity does link to other health relative problems, these fast food restaurants need to realize that obesity is an important problem right now in the United States and help finding a way to fix it.
Lots of different types of solutions to help reduce the obesity growing rates did not work, as you can see, the number of people becoming overweight/obese is still increasing rapidly, from childhood to adolescents. It clearly shows that the strategies and tactics to reverse this problem have been ineffective. However, there is still one last solution to control this, it is to put all the obese people, despite their ages, into different skim communities (with healthy people) and live there until they become healthier. These skim communities will be chosen by the government, they are where most of the fittest people in the United States live. According to Men’s Fitness, Salt Lake City of Utah is the fittest place in the U.S. The people will be given special clothes which will help the community to recognize them easier. On the blue T-shirt, there will be a symbol of a hamburger with an X crossed through it. They will have to go to work and live just like living their normal lives. When a period of time passed, they will be tested and need to pass the BMI test (BMI= 18.5 – 24.9) in order to get out and live their normal live again. The BMI test will be absolutely free for all patients. By using the Body Mass Index (BMI) scale, physicians can determine if their patients are overweight/obese or not (Overweight BMI = 25 – 29.9 kg/m2 and Obese BMI ≥ 30 kg/m2). Also, after the BMI test, they will be put on a 2-years “probation” which will be watched by their own physicians to make sure that they are used to the healthy living style and stick to it. To do this, a law must be passed by the government, let’s call it “the healthy law”. It will require all the people, who have been diagnosed to be overweight/obese by their own physicians, will have to come and live in a different environment where they will be treated and watched to make sure they can get away from the obese stage and become healthier. This will apply to all ages, however there are three exceptions. For those obese people who are in a process of an experiment to develop drugs for obesity, they will continue living with their normal lives. Second exception is for those who have extreme health problems in which they need to be treated immediately such as heart attack, diabetes, and the final stages of any types of cancer. Final exception is for those who are overweight/obese children under 15 years old but they need to live at least with a parent or guardian who is skim and healthy.
There will be people disagreeing with this because it is an extreme solution. One of the biggest problems that will occur is that a lot of families will be separated for an unknown period of time. Another problem will be like the obese people can feel unsafe living with other skimmer healthy people since they are used to live alone; this applies to those who are independent individuals. But the biggest problem is that obese people will begin to protest about the law because they feel unfair. They feel like their own country is forcing them to do this, not what they wanted to do, they can even feel betrayed. They might say thinks like: “Why did you people do this to us? We didn’t do anything wrong? You guys are treating us like criminals or some dangerous people. Please don’t put us in these “death camps”!!” this will lead to many commit suicide for others’ good, benefits to stop this. This kind of suicide is called self-immolation where a person setting himself/herself on fire. In order to calm this down, the government will need to resolve this in an effective way by letting the President speak: “This is for your own good! We do this because we CARE about your health, your life! Please help us getting this dreadful disease out of our country and let us have a wonderful and happy life after!” This might only calm the whole situation down for a short period of time, but when these people see some of the good results from the solution, this situation will be over.
The solution will cost the country a lot of money because of all the materials and equipment to maintain those skim communities and the drugs to treat obesity. To be able to keep the program running, the government will have no choice but increasing taxes. This will apply only to those fast food companies and on those rich people who are living on “top” of the world. And of course, this will create a big fight between the government and those people. Those companies and rich people will argue: “Why do I need to pay for something I did not agree on? You create it, you pay for it!” The government then will have to respond to them immediately: “This is for the good of our country, don’t you care about other people? Don’t you feel disappointed with your own self when you see other people struggling with their life that you could have helped?” The government is still going to increase the taxes whether those companies and other people agree or not because this is the whole country’s problem and maybe the whole world’s. With those funds to the program, it’s going to be a long-term solution and will help the United States decreasing the rates of obesity successfully. By calculation, in about 10 years, half of those obesity people who were put into the skim communities will become healthier and have their BMI decreasing to the appropriate numbers. This could change a lot of lives in the United States.
In conclusion, obesity is one of the most important problems right now in the United States. It does not only affect other people’s lives, especially the people with obesity, but it also leads to many obstinate health problems, such as different types of cancer, high blood pressure…if not prevented and treated right, number of deaths will be infinite. The obesity rates are still growing despite many solutions have been used in the past. However, this solution will definitely stop the growing of obesity, it will help putting all the obese people in a healthier lifestyle, there will be no other health cases that relate to obesity anymore. Although this solution is very tricky and does not have the accurate percentages for the success rates, and it will cost a lot of money, it is worth the try because there are no other choices right now; obesity is too contagious in the United States right now.
As said above, this solution is very tricky; its success rates are very unstable, this is because the real problem here is not just about putting all the people into this type of “camp”, it is the person’s choices. They have the right to make their own decisions, whether to be obesity or not. Even if obesity will be stopped in the United States, what about other countries? Will it work in those too? These are the questions that do not have the right answers but it will let other people to start thinking about it.
The message of this essay is to wake up the readers, to call them into action, to make them think about the problem, to convince them into making a new solution that will actually work to help decreasing the obesity growing rates!
Work Cited:
1. Baertlein, Lisa. “McDonald's profit, September sales beat expectations”. Yahoo
News. Oct 21, 2011. Web. Nov 26, 2011.
2. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. “U.S. Obesity Trends”. Overweight
and Obesity. Web. Nov 25, 2011.
3. Parker, Tara. “Doctors and Patients, Not Talking About Weight”. The New York
Times. March 16, 2010. Web. Nov 25, 2011.
4. Trentham-Dietz A, Newcomb PA, Egan KM. “Weight change and risk of
postmenopausal breast cancer (United States)”. PubMed Articles. Jul 2000. Web. Nov 26, 2011.
5. University of Alberta. "Why Computers Frustrate Older Adults."
ScienceDaily, Mar 16, 2007. Web. Nov 25, 2011.
6. Villareal, Dennis T, Apovian, Caroline M. “Obesity in older adults: technical
review and position statement of the American Society for Nutrition and NAASO, The Obesity Society”. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Vol. 82, No. 5, 923-934, Nov 2005. Web. Nov 26, 2011.
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