Obesity Today Essay

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Statistics show that 154.7 million Americans age 20 or older are overweight or obese (Statistical Fact Sheet 2013 Update, American Heart Association, 2013). Obesity is a serious issue towards individuals' physical and emotional health. It is affected by the psychological, biological, and cultural factors in the American society.
To begin with, the emotional well being of individuals play a huge role on whether or not they are overweight or not. Depression, anxiety, and stress are the main factors of obesity. Typically, people with depression rely on food for comfort. Comfort food might feel nice emotionally but physically it can hurt your body. Obesity leads to many different diseases such as: diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, some cancers and strokes. Individuals that have family issues or lack of motivation are also triggers to psychological obesity. It leads people to rely on food for comfort, because they don’t have anyone to talk to. No one is there for that individual to express their feelings to, so they rely on food.
Furthermore, the biological makeup of individuals also has a direct correlation with weight. If you have a slow metabolism you’re more likely to become overweight. Metabolism is determined by measuring the amount of oxygen used by the body over a specific amount of time. If the measurement is made at rest, it is known as the basal metabolic rate [BMR] (Thyroid, BMR & Weight, American Thyroid Association, 2013). However, scientists are finding that the thyroid has played a role in obesity. Tests have shown that most people with obesity also have thyroid dysfunction (Thyroid and Obesity: An Intriguing Relationship, Bernadette Biondi, 2010). Patients whose thyroid glands were not working were found to have low BMRs, and those with overactive thyroid glands had high BMRs (Thyroid, BMR & Weight, American Thyroid Association, 2013). Overeating is a problem for people with slow metabolisms. Your body can only handle so much food. Once it gets to a certain degree your stomach can’t handle all of the food it’s intaking. For example, if you’re filling up a water balloon and you overfill the balloon it will pop. However, your stomach won’t pop,it just doesn’t know where to put all the food. So, it expands and spreads the extra fat from the food throughout the body. Additionally, obesity is hereditary, if you have a family history of obesity you’re prone to being obese as well.
Finally, cultural factors can also produce overweight individuals. People’s surroundings can influence them to eat more with advertising and peer influence. All the fast food around America has a huge impact on overweight individuals, McDonald’s started in 1955 with nine restaurants; today they have 31,000 of them (Fast Food Statistics, 2010). Not only are there a significant amount of McDonald’s in America there are also 12,000 Burger King’s and 6,650 Wendy’s (Fast Food Statistics, 2010). Surrounded by all this fast food will definitely impact the way people eat. The more you’re surrounded by something the more you adapt to it. McDonald’s serves 1 in 6 Americans everyday, thats 108 million people everyday (Fast Food Statistics, 2010). The average
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