The Country's Climbing Obesity Situation

Being overweight is one of those issues that everyone has been talking about for the past few years. It has been getting gradually worse for the last two decades, but we seem to just now be realizing this. The country with the highest obesity ratio in the world is the U.S.. In the last 25 years the number of obese grown-ups and adolescents have risen by 100%. Nearly a third of the total adults over 20 and seventeen percent of all children were too heavy in 2004. This means that millions are too big and endangering their health. The prevalence of obesity continues to rise in America and other developed nations and is considered one of the biggest health threats in the country. What happened to make us all so big? Many environmental factors that are now an American way of life are believed to be the causes of this general increased girth.

During the 1980's, Americans began to have several factors of daily activity change to make for a more sedentary lifestyle. The first is the eating habits. Restaurants and fast food chains began to be the most popular places for family dinner instead of at the home prepared the traditional way. Due to competition, restaurants now have portion sizes that double or even triple the ones back in the 60's. A cheeseburger in many of today's most popular sit-down restaurants can be double or triple the size of a McDonald's Big Mac, even though the popular chain has been under fire the last few years as the leading culprit for America's weight problem. People that are used to eating everything on their plates can sit down and get their daily amount of calories in one sitting with one of these super sized meals.

Affluence is another major factor that seems to link to obesity. The need to conserve goods and foods diminishes gradually as people in developed nations acquire more and more wealth. Children that a couple of generations ago would have been more limited on food choices because of a parent's budget nowadays are given wider and bigger choices in what they partake in. With parents that eat out constantly because disposable income allows them to, children form their earliest eating habits with rich, high calorie restaurant foods. The U.S. produces nearly three times more food than U.S. residents eat, so most people are not worried about where or how their food is prepared and go more by food cravings.

Many Americans have a sedentary lifestyle, another major factor of obesity. Nowadays, even if it is a very short distance, many Americans will drive their cars. Busy lifestyles and hectic work schedules make it difficult for many people to find the time to work out. More jobs are becoming less active as technology is advanced. So now many Americans will work at the office on a computer all day and do nothing active all day because they are tired from their job.

Obesity affects you whether you're in those demographics or not. In the airline industry, lawsuits to widen passenger seats that are brought against airlines by obese people and the extra fuel that it takes to haul all this extra weight is now costing Americans an estimated 275,000,000 dollars a year now in increased air fares. In the medical field, health issues caused by obesity now make up nearly 10% of all medical expenditures with a yearly cost of 78,500,000,000 dollars. Litigation with obese plaintiffs became so prevalent, the government even tried to make laws protecting food producers with the Cheeseburger bill of 2004.

BMI, or body mass index is what is used to measure obesity. The higher the BMI, the more likely the person is to have serious health issues. There are three levels of obesity; mild obesity with a BMI of 30+, morbid obesity at BMI 40+, and malignant obesity with a BMI of 50+. A person that is forty percent overweight is twice as likely to suffer a fatal medical problem prematurely than an average person. Obesity kills an estimated 112,000 Americans per year. The risk of a heart attack, stroke, cancer, liver disease, and diabetes are just a few of the possible ailments that come along with being overweight. There are also a number of non-deadly ailments like depression, loss of bowel control, breathing problems, and swollen legs.

Michael Usry is a top affiliate of weight loss and the writer of the online health series "Beauty and Health in Plain Entglish".