Obesity Endemic
UNIB10009 – Food for a Healthy Planet
Research Essay (1987 words – including references)
7 Pages – Including Bibliography and Title
Question 2
World-wide, obesity has become a global human health problem. What are the main causes of the obesity endemic? Discuss the various actions that governments and individuals can undertake to combat obesity. The increasing rate of obesity around the world has made it one of the world’s worst problems in the last decade. Although the problem of being underweight has been a bigger concern, the problem relating to obesity has started to escalate exponentially (The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2013). Although obesity was only assumed to be happening in developed countries, obesity has now become widespread, globally affecting developing country as well such as India. Bhardwaj et al. (cited in Raychaudhuri & Sanyal 2012) states that the percentage of overweight across age 14-17 year old children in New Delhi during 2006-2007 reached 29% in private school and 11.3% in government school. Factors that caused the onset of widespread obesity are globalization and the resulting influence of western culture. The government and each individual should hence adopt measures and policies that will educate the dangers of obesity such as developing and restructuring policies as well as educating the danger of obesity to children and family.
Easy access to sugary food and drinks, as facilitated by global supply and demand chain, can apparently be blamed as one of the primary causes of the obesity endemic. According to Lustig, Schmidt and Brindis(2012), the consumption of food and drink that contain high sugar content has tripled globally over the past 50 years due to the cheap price and good taste. Many have alleged that this modernisation has facilitated a situation where developing countries eventually looked up to the developed countries – which are mostly made up of western countries – in terms of economic growth,
Research Essay (1987 words – including references)
7 Pages – Including Bibliography and Title
Question 2
World-wide, obesity has become a global human health problem. What are the main causes of the obesity endemic? Discuss the various actions that governments and individuals can undertake to combat obesity. The increasing rate of obesity around the world has made it one of the world’s worst problems in the last decade. Although the problem of being underweight has been a bigger concern, the problem relating to obesity has started to escalate exponentially (The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2013). Although obesity was only assumed to be happening in developed countries, obesity has now become widespread, globally affecting developing country as well such as India. Bhardwaj et al. (cited in Raychaudhuri & Sanyal 2012) states that the percentage of overweight across age 14-17 year old children in New Delhi during 2006-2007 reached 29% in private school and 11.3% in government school. Factors that caused the onset of widespread obesity are globalization and the resulting influence of western culture. The government and each individual should hence adopt measures and policies that will educate the dangers of obesity such as developing and restructuring policies as well as educating the danger of obesity to children and family.
Easy access to sugary food and drinks, as facilitated by global supply and demand chain, can apparently be blamed as one of the primary causes of the obesity endemic. According to Lustig, Schmidt and Brindis(2012), the consumption of food and drink that contain high sugar content has tripled globally over the past 50 years due to the cheap price and good taste. Many have alleged that this modernisation has facilitated a situation where developing countries eventually looked up to the developed countries – which are mostly made up of western countries – in terms of economic growth,
Bibliography: Ebbeling, CB, Pawlak, DB & Ludwig, DS 2002, 'Childhood obesity: public-health crisis, common sense cure ', Lancet, vol. 360, no. 9331, pp. 473-82. Lustig, RH, Schmidt, LA & Brindis, CD 2012, 'Public health: The toxic truth about sugar ', Nature, vol. 482, no. 7383, pp. 27-9. Spritzer, DA 2004, 'Obesity epidemic migrates east ', CMAJ, vol. 171, no. 10, p. 1159.