Obesity Epidemic in America

Obesity Epidemic in America

Introduction:

In America today on average one out of every three American adults are obese, which is about 59 million people! And close to two out of three American adults are considered overweight or obese. This is a problem that affects everyone, and we need to make everyone aware of this super sized problem!

Preview:

Even though we see an ongoing surge of diet pills and exercise programs in America we are still bulging at the waist more now than ever before. It’s too easy these days to eat your entire “recommended daily calorie intake” in one meal. With a fast food restaurant on just about every street corner, how can you resist the cheap and easy fast food? Even if you don’t eat this kind of food, and maybe you don’t even drink soda pop, but instead you drink “juices”, well in most instances these so called juices only have about 5-10 percent juice and are filled with high fructose corn syrup. This is an epidemic, not just some fad, and it needs to be stopped.

Body:

This is a huge epidemic that just literally keeps on growing, so we need to stop it where it’s growing. Currently about 17.1% of American children ages 2-19 are overweight, as well as about 10 percent of these children between 2 and 5 are factored in as being overweight! For the most part, however more in the younger kids, it’s not their fault, but their parent’s. So we need to do something.

Teaching healthy behaviors at a young age is important since change becomes more difficult with age. Behaviors involving physical activity and nutrition are the cornerstone of preventing obesity in children and adolescents. Families and schools are the 2 most critical links in providing the foundation for those behaviors.

Obesity is becoming such a large factor that it is on the verge of surpassing smoking and the number one cause of preventable death. If you’re like me I know I see ads to quit smoking on a daily basis, whether or not they are affective I don’t know because I don’t smoke. So why don’t we see more about the obesity epidemic? Because obesity is becoming such a large problem I believe that there should be more media trying to show us the problem, which they obviously love to do. The most we seem to see from the media about people being overweight and or obese are on TV reality shows which people are encouraged to lose weight for some kind of reward. Sure this makes for an interesting show for people to watch while they eat their fast food, but it’s not really helping anyone besides the 10 people on the show lose weight. In fact, it is most likely just helping America gain even more weight by sitting on the couch eating food while watching others try and lose weight…

So what can we really do about this epidemic that only seems to be getting worse? You would maybe think because health insurance cost more for someone who is overweight or obese would help even a little bit but it doesn’t seem to. So maybe the government should get involved, almost like the Trans Fat regulations states have put on their foods in restaurants. So maybe the government should try and use its legislative power