OBESITY : GLOBAL ISSUE!!!

Excess weight is major medical problem after cigarette smoking, is the second largest cause of death.Obesity is on the rise, and it is becoming more and more of a national health concern. It effects more than 1/3 of the population, and an additional 1/3 is overweight. With obesity becoming more and more of a problem each year, the world population is going to suffer from a catastrophic health emergency.

What is obesity? Obesity is a heath condition where the subject has an abnormally large amount of fat for their height. A person who has a body mass index of over 30 is classified obese. Dietary Guidelines. Who does obesity affect? Obesity affects 1/3 of all classes of Americans. However, the highest percentage of obese people per captain can be found in the lower class. The lower class typically eats more cheap, highly processed, high-calorie foods. What causes obesity? Overweight and obesity result from an energy imbalance. This involves eating too many calories and not getting enough physical activity. High calorie foods are more easily available today than ever before. Americans have also never had a less active lifestyle.

However, obesity treatments remain controversial, and only surgical therapies have patient volume and appropriate follow-up adequate to prove effectiveness. Today’s challenge in health care is to prevent or diagnose, treat, and manage acute or chronic diseases that affect many people while controlling cost, maintaining standards of care, and improving quality of life.

Obesity is one such treatable disease because of its association with physical, psychosocial, and disability costs that affect quality of life. For the severely obese, it is a chronic, heterogeneous, multisystemic disese that has many equivocal causes and consequences. Recent findings show the importance of genetic factors as a major influence in the etiology and refractory nature of obesity. Aggressive, medically supervised interventions, such as very-low-calorie diets (VLCDs) and pharmacologic and surgical treatments, are especially needed for genetically susceptible individuals who do not respond to low-risk dieting and behavioral modification treatments or cannot maintain a healthy body weight despite multiple attempts to lose weight. A model is neede to incorporate these obesity treatment guidelines into an everyday clinical physician practice.

THIS IS A BIG PROBLEM!