Obesity Epidemic Analysis

Obesity is a worldwide epidemic recognized to the highest extent by the World Health Organization. Countries like the United States, Great Britain and other European and First world countries have started to take steps to try and reduce the colossus that is obesity. With obesity being such a problem in the United States, people are doing what they can to help. The economy, fast food restaurants, stigmatization and discrimination towards the disease, and advances in technology, people are fighting a problem that's fighting back, and it seems to be winning.
The economy plays a large role in obesity. Over years and years of research, people have directly linked money to obesity, but surprisingly the less money a person has to spend on food,
As technology grows, so does the percent of obese population. For hundreds of years, lack of food had been the demise of millions, now obesity is considered a public health crisis, and only for the past couple of decades. Only after technological advances in the 18th century did people start to have a more readily available source of sustenance. At the time, these advances helped people to live longer, and to have better nutrition. Unfortunately, over time this was not found to be the case. Big advances to agricultural technology like the Reaper, pesticides, and even larger corporations like Monsanto have been proven to produce more food than needed, and on top of this, most of the food produced by these corporations get processed into something unhealthy via large industrial machines. "The initial effect of these advances in improved public health and amount, quality, and variety of food was increased longevity and body size. These early favorable outcomes of technological advances notwithstanding, their incremental effect since the Second World War has been an overabundance of easily accessible food, coupled with reduced physical activity, that accounts for the recent increased prevalence of obesity,"(Eknoyan n.Pg.) says Garabed Eknoyan of Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. He is an editor for the Advances in Chronic Kidney Disease, and published an article on the
A recent study by the International Journal of Obesity & Related Metabolic Disorders published an article on this epidemic. The objective, using standardized international definitions, was to find the prevalence and trends in obesity in the United States. Although they found that obesity rates from a BMI of above 30 has increased over time, and will keep increasing, BMI from 25 to 29.9 has not. “RESULTS: For men and women aged 20–74 y, the age-adjusted prevalence of BMI 25.0–29.9 showed little or no increase over time”(Flegal, Carroll, Kuczmarski, Johnson, n.Pg). The research was executed by K M Flegal, M D Carroll, R J Kuczmarski and C L Johnson. Ms Flegal is an American epidemiologist and is a senior scientist at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Carroll is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the Stanford Medical University. Mr Kuczmarski has written 38 articles involving obesity, public health, growth in young children and articles involving blood pressure in the United States. All of his 38 articles have been published on the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Johnson is a plastic surgeon with over 6 years of medical experience around the world, and graduated from Harvard Medical School, and holds his Masters of Science in Biochemistry from Oxford University. He also completed a fellowship at the University of Massachusetts, and specialises in the use of