Obesity and the unhealthy Obsession about being thin

Introduction

The obesity is a chronic disease, characterized by excess body fat and occurs when the body mass index in adults is greater than 25. Obese people are at risk of serious health and physical disorder. On the other extreme, the obsession of being thin is also becoming common in our youth, which is also very dangerous for health. Both of these problems need to be addressed properly.

The paper is an attempt to clarify the misconception that exists about obesity, of it being the number one killer of American public, also point-out the side-effects of unhealthy obsession of being thin.

Discussion

The reality of obesity concern

Over the years, obesity has been considered one of the major reasons for a large number of people's death. It is considered as the number one killer of American public. However, there is not much supporting evidence. The recent researches prove that obesity is not the only reason behind the large number of deaths, in reality a bunch of reasons add up with it to cause this much devastation.

It is believed that obesity causes around 300,000 deaths a year. This figure appeared in a study, conducted by William Foege and McGinnis in 1993, of the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA). It concluded that the laid-back life-style pattern and dietary style, leads to hypertension, cancer and obesity, and results in 300,000 deaths a year (JAMA 270, pp 2207-2212). In 1998, this figure was misrepresented by the New England Journal (NEJ) of Medicine, stating that obesity caused 300,000 deaths a year; which forced the conductors of the study to write a concerning letter to the NEJ regarding the misrepresentation of the fact (NEJ , p. 1157).

However in 2005, a lead scientist re-assessed the study data. He concluded that the number of people dying from obesity was actually 110,000 a year, not 300,000. He also pointed that people with obese range BMI (26-35) actually lived longer than people who had normal BMI (22-25). And obese range BMI people are when subtracted from the population, the annual obesity death rate turns out to be 26,500 which is less than the number of people that die from gunshot wound (1% of total deaths are caused by gunshot wounds) (Kochanek, p.40).

Glenn Gaesser, PhD, in 1996, after a detailed study reported that even though obesity is maligned for the death of a large number ...