In the intriguing article, “The ‘Childhood Obesity Epidemic’”, Tina Moffat presented the health issue of childhood obesity. In recent years, obesity has become an important issue on the public agenda. Ever since I was young, the word obesity began to pervade and increased its popularity throughout high school and college, as people become more self-conscious about their body sizes and more influenced by the mainstream view on overweight or obese people. Since childhood obesity is metaphorically refers as “epidemic”, there must be a cause for this “epidemic”. Moffat listed several causes for obesity in the article, and the main causes are victims themselves, victims’ parents, social construction, and “toxic” environment. Out of all the factors that contributed to childhood obesity, I agree with the social construction and the “toxic” environment the most. people live in poor neighborhood often have less access to fresh, healthy, and nutritious food due to poor social construction. They also tend to eat unhealthy because there is no nearby grocery store, and the only available …show more content…
People often discriminate overweight or obese people and categorize them as gluttons. However, since BMI is calculated by weight over height squared (kg/m^2), it can be inaccurately calculated when a person has huge head size, different torso-to-leg ratio, large muscle mass, etc. Take a friend as example. My friend is a muscular guy who goes to gym quite often and has height of 5’11”. However, when I calculated his BMI, his BMI appeared to be 26.8, which is considered overweight since normal adult BMI range from 18.5 to 24.9. Although my friend’s BMI is above the normal range, he is still healthy and fit. The example of my friend indicated that BMI should not be entirely trusted and the actual condition of that certain person should be taken into consideration along with the