Obesity Epidemic

Obesity Epidemic



Obesity Epidemic

Introduction

Obesity is a chronic disease comprising of the boost in body fat stores. Therefore, perfectly, the delineation of obesity should address the allowance of body fat. However, measuring body fat needs rather complicated procedures that make population-based measure of body fat nearly unrealistic to perform. Consequently, there are not accurately characterised usual standards of body fat. Thus, for functional causes, obesity is measured via the Body Mass Index (BMI), a assessment taking into account the weight for a granted height: BMI=Weight (kg)/height (m)2. BMI highly correlates with total body fat and is very helpful for epidemiological purposes. Based on the BMI and on its connection with death from all determinants, the WHO2 has established distinct cut-off points endowing the classification of obesity (Table 1).Table 1.

Classification of adult obesity.

Classification

BMI (kg/m2)

Risk of comorbidities

Normal range

18.5-24.9

Average

Overweight

=25.0

Preobesity

25.0-29.9

Increased

Obesity class I

30.00-34.9

Moderate

Obesity class II

35.00-39.9

Severe

Obesity class III

=40.0

Very severe

This WHO classification of obesity is unanimously acknowledged as a measure of obesity in mature individuals, yet for childhood obesity, the use of the BMI may be rather confusing. Usually the per hundred of surplus weight has been utilised to characterise the situation. A 120% of weight as asserted by a weight for age and size benches has been advised as obesity. In line with these criteria, important dissimilarities can be discovered on obesity occurrence in some European countries.

Due to its good association with fat mass, it might be attractive to use the BMI as a measure of obesity in children. The difficulty is that the BMI in young children has commonly broad variations in relative to age and race. Thus, what is usual in a exact humanity could be advised as pathologic in numerous other components of the world. This is the major cause why the most of paediatric associations had its own BMI percentile tables. This furthermore interprets the high variability we could find if we desire to contrast the occurrence of overweight or obesity amidst distinct countries. Normally a BMI overhead the 85th percentile is advised overweight while obesity is identified when the BMI is over the 95th percentile of BMI as asserted by the slash off points for this exact country.

Recently efforts have been made to universalize these BMI slash off points, and the outcomes have been issued as a latest paper by Cole and co-workers. These benches can be utilised all through the world, and will make it simpler to characterise obesity both at one-by-one and community levels. Using these new benches will likely lead to alterations in the occurrence of obesity round the world. In fact, a latest review in the U.K. has shown considerable alterations in the occurrence of obesity utilising these new measures for BMI.

 

The waist circumference

Regarding the health risks associated to obesity, we have to take into account not only the magnitude of obesity but furthermore, and possibly more applicable, the body fat distribution. There are two major kinds of obesity considering the fat circulation pattern: android or centered kind obesity with the most of fat depots established ...