OBESITY

Is Obesity a Personal Choice

Is Obesity a Personal Choice

Introduction

There are a lot of people who agree with this assessment about obesity. There's no question that obesity is a result of a person's daily lifestyle choices. However, one problem with outright blaming obese people for being so obese is that educational information on nutrition, foods, grocery store products, soft drinks, fast foods and other dietary sources simply aren't readily available. There's no easy way for most people to actually get the information they need to make healthier choices. As a result, they may have no idea that what they're eating will cause obesity and chronic disease.

The federal government isn't helping, either. With virtually no money spent on disease prevention, the government is practically guaranteeing that an entire generation will end up hooked on a lifetime of prescription drugs thanks to the fact that they're all diseased from making poor nutritional choices. This policy to avoid prevention, by the way, helps ensure the profits of pharmaceutical companies (darlings of the Bush Administration). See, your good health isn't profitable to anyone, but your chronic disease helps generate billions of dollars in pharmaceutical profits.

On the other hand, even when most people are made aware of the health dangers of foods, they keep on eating the garbage foods anyway! People must certainly know that ice cream and soft drinks promote obesity, and yet you see it time and time again at the supermarket: loads of ice cream tubs and 12-packs of soft drinks in the shopping carts of 300-pound people who can barely squeeze into the checkout lanes. Clearly, this is a personal responsibility problem: these people need to stop making excuses and start making better choices about foods and groceries.

Theorizing obesity

How can this rise in obesity be explained? As has already been indicated, obesity is multicausal - at its simplest an over-consumption of calories relative to expenditure of physical energy - and it has competing interpretations of the key factors both in aetiology (causation) and intervention. Obesity has a capacity to raise deep philosophical questions of liberty and the role and responsibility of the state, the citizen and companies. To say that obesity, even mass obesity, is a public-health problem is not universally accepted (Campos, 2004). It has also been argued that obesity is a matter of individual choices (Weber Shandwick, 2004). According to this position, people 'choose' to be overweight simply because they eat too much and do too little. A public-health perspective, in contrast, sees that while private choices are necessarily part of the total explanatory picture for adults, the well documented rise in childhood obesity - nationally, regionally and globally - means that the individualistic perspective cannot so simply be applied to policy for children's health; their choices are for the most part determined by features of the adult-framed environment such as transport, culture, education, eating habits (Ebbeling et al., 2002, Nestle and Jacobson, 2000; Robertson et al., 2004; Strauss and Knight, 1999).

Obesity and Personal Choice

Weight is always about ...