come since 12 % of US infants between the ages of 6 and 23 months are obese, and studies tell us that fat infants nearly always end up fat kids and even fatter adults.
.....But why, it’s entirely legitimate to ask, is obesity such a major public health problem? Because study after study after study concludes that people who pack on too many pounds are at significantly higher risk of many major life-limiting health problems: heart disease, strokes, diabetes, all sorts of cancers (this list grows yearly), nearly every “degenerative” condition you can name, and on and on, which is why, after cigarette smoking, obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the world, and some experts say it will very soon become number one on that hit-your-life parade.
.....(By the way, besides raising the risk of several illnesses that kill you prematurely, obesity also hits you in ways that most of you rarely consider but which nevertheless affect your quality of life quite adversely, entities such as chronic pain, depression, low self-esteem, lower achievement in jobs and relationships, and one condition that I really want to flag called “disability of daily living”, which means an obese person loses the ability to do the kinds of things you and I take for granted such as going shopping, walking down a flight of stairs, playing with grandchildren, even taking a shower).
.....But back to how obesity limits life expectancy, and the thing that’s rather startling, I think, is that because so many young kids are now morbidly overweight, a growing number of experts believe that the generations coming along now are the first generations in history which will not live as long as their parents.
.....And if you think that all this is just scare-mongering (several best-selling books have been written with the theme that health authorities are peddling obesity scares simply as the panic-de-jour), a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine which tracked nearly 300,000 Danish kids for 50 years found that kids who are overweight (not obese, mind, but just overweight by a few pounds) are at significantly higher risk of heart disease as adults, with many such fat kids developing signs of heart disease as young as age 25.
.....But that still begs the question about why this is occurring to our kids. Well, that’s pretty obvious, I think. So although there may be some genetic basis to some cases of obesity, it’s unlikely that our |
|
|
WHERE PEOPLE COME
FIRST