Obesity and Weightloss

Introduction

Obesity affects the physical, mental, and psychosocial health of an individual. People diagnosed with obesity have a shorter life span and are at increased risk for diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, arthritis, certain cancers, and obstructive sleep apnea. They are more likely to experience depression and anxiety than the non-obese. People who are diagnosed as obese have also been subjected to social stigmatization. Obese children can develop general musculoskeletal disorders, such as shin splints and stress fractures, and painful joint conditions, such as Blount disease, an abnormal and painful bowing of the leg, or slipped capital femoral epiphysis, a shift of the growing part of the femur, resulting in hip pain and decreased motion. They are also at higher risk for heat illness than their same-age, normal-weight counterparts. They also can develop many of the adverse physiologic consequences of obesity listed above.

Obesity rates are shockingly high and continue to rise. In the United States, a country that sets the trends of the Western world, over a third of its population are obese that is commonly considered a BMI of thirty or more. The researchers predict that in ten years, forty percent of the population could suffer from obesity. The health system of the United States, already facing high costs and the needs are increasing, so only provided that its resources are being increasingly burdened by the continuing trend towards obesity.

Discussion

Obese people are at risk for a variety of dangerous diseases such as diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease, cancer, sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, respiratory diseases, depression and many others. Almost all of these diseases are chronic, meaning it can last for life. These diseases require expensive long-term treatment, and if not treated properly, which led to hospitalization, surgery and extensive rehabilitation.

All of these services must be provided in health care, from hospitals to a physiotherapist, a pharmacy and state and federal governments, which finance the network health insurance program Medicare, like Medicaid. Carries the financial burden of obesity on health is alarming and threatens to worsen. It is believed that the current health care costs that are directly related to obesity amounted to U $ S 147 million a year.

This number increases dramatically in the billions of dollars to add all the expenses for chronic diseases associated with obesity such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Today, obesity alone accounts for about ten percent of total health spending in the United States. At the individual level, the obese person has accumulated more than forty percent of medical costs that individual with an average healthy weight.

The cost of obesity has doubled over the past ten years, and seems to slow for the whole world. If this trend continues, by 2018 the cost of obesity can be up to twenty percent of all costs related to health, a total of $ 344 million a year. So much so that health care remains a major economic burden for a significant proportion of the population, especially those with chronic diseases. Insurance premiums for people at ...