Two thirds of all Americans are overweight or obese. That means when you go to the mall for every ten habitancy you see six will be overweight or obese. Amazing! This whole is growing. Soon seven out of ten habitancy will be overweight or obese. It is now more common for adults in our community to be overweight and obese than in a healthy weight range. It's not just adults, however. Obesity in children is also growing at alarming rates. The health consequences that these children face and are going to continue to face in their futures is a true tragedy.
Of course the definite question with obesity is that it causes major health problems. Obesity drastically increases one's risk for Type Ii diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, cancer, as well as psychological illnesses such as severe depression and perfect withdraw from family/society.
The Centers for Disease control and Prevention, Cdc, stated that obesity will soon take over tobacco as the prominent preventable cause of death. Harvard School of group health discovered that one third of all cancers are due to issues of nutrition, mostly obesity. It has also observed that obesity will soon be responsible for more cancers than smoking.
It is no embellishment that in 100 years habitancy will look back at this time and talk about the obesity epidemic and how it destroyed more habitancy than any epidemic in history. Epidemics like the black plague and Aids will pale in comparison to the devastation caused by obesity.
We know fighting fat is not simple. We know that there is no one magical diet that will work for all. If there was a magic diet or pill there would not be an epidemic. There does not exist an isolated reply (such as, a single diet, a single pill, a single practice routine, a single self-help tape) to fighting fat, because fighting fat is such a complex problem.
Fighting fat with these methods - a single diet, a single pill, a single practice routine, a single self-help tape, and surgery - has done two things. First it has failed to ensue in permanent weight loss, and second it has made a lot of habitancy very rich.
Billions of dollars are spent by consumers each and every year in hope of looking the clarification to fighting fat. Unfortunately, all that is truly being purchased is the equivalent of a Band-Aid to fix a bullet wound. They are superficial fixes that do not attack the question at the root, and therefore offer whether temporary fixes or no fix at all. These are not profound observations. All you have to do is look at the question at hand, then look at the solutions offered and employed, and ultimately look at the results these solutions have in case,granted thus far.
Let's look at the question at hand first. Obesity is an epidemic that will soon be responsible for more deaths every year than any other preventable cause of death. This epidemic has been growing like wildfire over the past two decades, and continues to grow with no end in sight.
Next, we will look at the three most common solutions offered and employed to fix the problem. The first one is Fad Diets. Here is a short list of fad diets you may have heard of before: cabbage diet, grapefruit diet, lazy diet, Atkins diet, 3 day diet, 7 day diet, 30 day diet, chocolate diet, fruit juice diet, low fat diet, South Beach diet, negative calorie diet, six times a day diet, one good meal diet, Hollywood diet, The Zone, Sugar Busters, Carb Addicts, Sugar Addicts, Jenny Craig, Dr. Phil, metabolism diet, protein power, glycemic index diet, fast food diet, Alien diet, etc.
The second common way offered to fix the obesity epidemic is with drugs, a.k.a. Diet pills. There are two classes of drugs. They are known as the ever popular All Natural drugs, and the growing in popularity pharmaceutical artificial drugs.
The third way offered to fix the obesity epidemic is with surgeries such as liposuction and gastric bypass.
Now let's look at the results. We'll start with fad diets. Fad diets ordinarily ensue in an introductory weight loss, followed by a cycle of frustration, loss of motivation, and weight gain. The diets plans do not contain how to convert behavior, therefore they fail. In order for an individual to achieve permanent weight loss they must convert their 'frame of mind'. These fad diets do not do this.
How about drugs? Let's start with the all natural pills, drinks, powders, etc. One of the biggest money manufacture marketing tactics over the past 10 years has been to attach the words "All Natural" to everything. For some crazy intuit habitancy think that just because something is from nature that it is, not only not harmful, but good for you. In addition, for this marketing technique to be verily sufficient it must attack everything else as being a harmful chemical. You hear this all the time being stated as, Don't put those chemicals into your body, instead use this all natural substance. The whole thing is not based on any truth and potentially very dangerous.
First of all, everything is a chemical. Have you every tried dihydrogen oxide? Dihydrogen oxide sounds like a pretty serious chemical doesn't it. Well its common name is water. Water is made when 2 hydrogen atoms are chemically bonded to an oxygen atom - H2O. Life cannot exist without water. However, if you drink too much water you will die from water toxicity. Of course water can be toxic. Whatever can be toxic, and everything is a chemical.
Would you eat arsenic, plutonium, mercury, or lead? Why not, they are all natural. Each one is a underlying element found in nature. If you're verily interested in getting some arsenic you can find it in apple seeds. Do you know how many deadly poisons are produced in nature by plants alone? Many of your backyards are full of them.
The lowest line is that it is insane and very dangerous to think something is good for you and not harmful just because it can be found naturally. Do not let the All Natural marketing tactic ever persuade you again! You know what I say about the All Natural diet pills and all the other All Natural marketing that is promoted by the qualified multi-billion dollar health industry - caveat emptor which means buyer beware.
The truth is that the mechanism of most of the diet pills is that they contain some stimulant, most often a form of caffeine. For example, guarana is a very popular ingredient in many diet aids. Guarana is a climbing plant common to Brazil that produces a fruit that has about three times the whole of caffeine as typical coffee beans. The lowest line is that guarana is all natura' and it contains the stimulant caffeine. There are numerous names for caffeine. When found in guarana its called guaranine. When it's found in the yerba mate plant it's called mateine, and in common tea leaves the caffeine is called theine. They are all synonyms for the same chemical compound. All of these separate names allow marketers to hide the fact that their products just contain a bunch of caffeine or caffeine metabolites.
Overall, stimulants do increase your metabolism which does ensue in burning more calories. Stimulants also raise your blood pressure, irritate your nervous system, cause your heart to work harder, and stress your cardiovascular system. In addition, over time, your body grows a tolerance to the stimulant and the only way to get the same effects is to increase the whole taken. As you can imagine, this can come to be very dangerous. Oh by the way, there is other popular plant leaf that contains an all natural stimulant that increases your metabolism and helps burn calories. It's known as cocaine. Are you getting my point?
Are the pharmaceutical artificial diet pills any better? Since weight loss is a multi-billion dollar industry, every person wants to be involved. Big pharmaceutical companies are no different. They have big budgets earmarked for weight loss study and development. Their goal is to find a chemical that can be taken by overweight and obese individuals that will ensue in weight loss.
The process to find a chemical such as this begins with study on lab animals, such as rats. If they find a chemical that shows definite results in the animals without causing evident harm, they move to the next phase which is human trials. Initially, the chemical will be tested on small groups of volunteers, or paid participants. If these early experiments show promise, then the studies come to be larger. If over time and over numerous studies, the chemical is shown to be sufficient - statistically - and not harmful - within intuit - then the chemical will be deemed safe and sufficient for use by the general population. It will subsequently be marketed, prescribed, and sold.
This all sounds reasonable, but here is why this hasn't led to solving the obesity epidemic. The studies are little to a relatively small sample of the population. Just because there was definite results and seemingly no harmful side effects to this relatively small segment of the habitancy does not mean it is going to be safe and sufficient for the habitancy at large. every person is physiologically and genetically different. There are too many differences between habitancy in the general habitancy for one drug to be safe and sufficient for everyone.
Have you ever heard of Fen-Phen? Fen-Phen is a compound rehabilitation of two drugs Fenfluramine and Dexfenfluramine that was designed and touted as an sufficient and safe weight loss medicine. Well it wasn't long before physiological unlikeness among the habitancy popped up, and the Fda was bombarded with reports of Fen-Phen causing heart valve disease. The final result, Fen-Phen was taken off the market, big law suits ensued, habitancy were physically damaged, and obesity is still an epidemic.
The third unsuccessful effort at curing the obesity epidemic is straight through surgeries, such as liposuction and gastric bypass. Liposuction is a surgery where fat is sucked out from where it accumulates under the skin. This sounds pretty cool except for the fact that it is not a permanent solution. As soon as the individual begins to take in more vigor than is being used their body very efficiently begins to make brand new fat cells to store the excess energy. In other words, this 'solution' ain't going to last long if the eating behavior that got them to this point in the place is resumed after the surgery. Liposuction is merely a temporary solution.
Gastric Bypass is an extreme surgery that basically removes and re-routes portions of your digestive tract to physically limit the whole of food that can be consumed and absorbed. This surgery is extreme, painful, and very dangerous, as numerous habitancy have died from the surgery itself. If the surgery is successful, the individual does ordinarily lose weight. They lose weight because they are physically little to what they can eat. If they overeat, which often means more than a few tablespoons of food at a time, they will vomit it up.
One question that arises is that it is difficult to get permissible nutrient absorption. In addition, what happens is that, straight through force feeding, the digestive tract grows to adapt larger and larger amounts of food. Before not too long these individuals can eat as much as they had in the past, which translates into gaining all the weight back. Gastric bypass, by itself, is not a permanent solution.
What do all these 'Solutions' have in common? They are all a quick fix, they require very little effort on the part of the man attempting to lose weight, man else is manufacture money, and they are not sufficient in producing permanent weight loss.
In all fairness, a clarification to any question that is a quick fix and requires little effort is never going to be a permanent solution. Once again, there verily is nothing profound being observed here.
What is being done by the Government and Schools? Never in the history of human existence has the rate of obesity increased more than it has over just the past two decades. Of course, the definite query is - Why? Well, the definite reply is that there is no single reason. I'd like to point out some of the major causes.
In the September 2007 edition of Scientific American, Nyu professor Marion Nestle pointed to a political cause of obesity. She noted that in 1980 the Reagan administration's deregulation of industry freed up agricultural production. This encouraged farmers to grow more food. The calories available per capita in the U.S. Increased from 3,200 a day in 1980 to 3,900 a day two decades later. That is a unlikeness of 700 calories available in the U.S. Food furnish per man per day.
Let's put this in perspective. With everything else staying constant, if you eat 500 less calories per day, you will lose one pound of fat every week. Based on this, if you consumed 700 extra calories per day for a year you would gain 73 pounds. Now most habitancy don't gain this much weight in a year because there are a lot of other variables that must be included, but you get the idea of the importance this political move had on the obesity epidemic.
This led to one of the most essential causes of obesity - increased part size! Professor Nestle additional exposed the following: The early 1980's also marked the coming of the shareholder value movement on Wall Street. Stockholder demands for higher short-term returns on investments forced food companies to progress sales in a marketplace that already contained inordinate calories. Food companies responded by seeking new sales and marketing opportunities. They encouraged formerly shunned practices that at last changed group norms, such as frequent between-meal snacking, eating in book and clothing stores, and serving larger portions.
There is so much food available that food establishments, such as restaurants, use huge part sizes as a marketing tool. We have grown conditioned and accustomed to these gigantic portions of food. The lowest line is that these portions are plainly too much. It's sadly ironic that there are habitancy verily starving around the world and yet truth be told there is a surplus of food. The question of starvation around the world is not enough food production. The question is food distribution. It's an economic and logistics problem.
Since we're on the government, let's talk about the Food Guide Pyramid. The Food Guide Pyramid, advanced in 1991, was the government's underhanded effort to educate habitancy on how to eat a balanced and healthy diet. The subject of government responsible for producing the Food Guide Pyramid is the United States department of Agriculture (Usda). First of all, don't you think that there is a more qualified subject of the government to settle what a healthy diet constitutes - like a healing or health branch? You know, a subject that verily has individuals extremely qualified to talk about healing and health issues. When I want to know how to plant corn I'll call the department of Agriculture, not when I want to know what diet will keep me healthy.
Walter Willett, chairperson of the department of cusine at the Harvard School of group Health, states that the government's pyramid is built on "shaky scientific ground and that it is tremendously flawed". Dr. Willett is basing his response on the very best science and controlled studies we have available today. And when he was asked about the government's food pyramid stance on fats, protein, dairy, and carbohydrates, Willett said none of this is accurate, and the pyramid is so out of sync with scientific evidence that it almost has to be totally dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.
Why would the department of Agriculture do this? If you study the Food Guide Pyramid, you would see that it recommends that individuals, by far, get the majority of their daily calories from agricultural products such as rice, pasta, bread, and potatoes. Yes, it is a self serving guide that benefits lobbying groups such as the U.S. Potato Board and other farming interest groups. This has nothing to do with a conspiracy theory, but everything to do with plainly lining pockets and serving political agendas. Sad, but true.
In 2005, the government released a new version of the pyramid called My Pyramid. It's just more ambiguous, and therefore is less able to be directly attacked. All you have to know about the new pyramid is that it is still put out by the department of Agriculture.
Are our schools doing a great job? Let's start with the basics - school lunches. Read the following guidelines from the U.S. department of Agriculture concerning school lunches. Then you can be the judge of whose best interests are in mind. I don't think you will discontinue that it is our children's best interest.
This is a direct quote from the U.S. department of Agriculture. Generally, group or nonprofit underground schools of high school grade or under and group or nonprofit underground residential child care institutions may participate in the school lunch program. School districts and independent schools that choose to take part in the lunch program get cash subsidies and donated commodities from the U.S. department of Agriculture (Usda) for each meal they serve. In return, they must serve lunches that meet Federal requirements. In expanding to cash reimbursements, schools are entitled by law to receive commodity foods, called "entitlement" foods. Schools can also get "bonus" commodities as they are available from surplus agricultural stocks. School food authorities can also be reimbursed for snacks served to children straight through age 18 in after school educational or enrichment programs. U.S. department of Agriculture
Another inexcusable act being committed by schools is the strategic placement and availability of vending machines. These vending machines are filled with soda, candy, caffeine and sugar laden vigor drinks, chips, and cupcakes. Food and vending companies bid to have their machines located in the cafeteria, halls, and even the gym. The companies get money, the school gets money, and the kids get overweight and unhealthy.
Perhaps the most sinful act of all, however, is the reduction / elimination of physical performance in the curriculum. Gym class and recess are disappearing. Child obesity, diabetes in children, hypertension in children, and restlessness in children are all increasing. You don't have to have a healing background to see the connection here. It's more of just observing and having common sense.
As a college professor who teaches freshman and sophomores, I see first hand the level at which our students are ready after they leave high school. I'm not going to discuss math and writing skills, but I am going to point out the lack of real world preparation that these students have. lowest line is that our secondary instruction theory is dropping the ball when is comes to real world preparation. This includes things like: writing a resume and interviewing for a job, insight separate types of mortgages and other basic facts when buying a home, insight contracts such as lease agreements, insight prestige cards, bank loans, car loans, and prestige scores, insight how to leverage and spend money; stocks and real estate, insight the importance of basic health maintenance such as regular dental and doctor visits, regular self breast and testicular exams, insight the basics of carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals, insight the real health issues related with obesity, and insight how to read food labels and serving size.
This list could go on and on. From the above list I can warrant you that if properly educated the following tragedies would have been limited: U.S. Foreclosure Explosion of 2008, gigantic prestige card debt, and of course the Obesity Epidemic of the 21 century.
H.G. Wells said that human history becomes more and more a race between instruction and catastrophe. I hate to say it but I think our instruction theory is losing. We need change! If we are going to conquer this epidemic, we need to start doing things differently. We cannot attack this question as we have been, because it obviously is just not working.
directory 3 Ways That Failed to Solve the Obesity Epidemic - Big Time directory