Essay On The Effects Of Obesity On African Americans

on African American population. They found out that popular African American programs featured a greater number of overweight characters and advertisements for candy and carbonated soft drinks than programs intended for a general audience. The products marketed to African Americans are high caloric and low nutritional foods and beverages. (Tirodkar & Jain, 2003) African American people with low income have less knowledge of nutritious food. Most of them cannot afford higher education. So, they do not know the advantages of eating healthy food. Similarly, they tend to believe what they see and hear. Advertisements of less nutritious foods are very attractive. So, people watching commercials get easily tempted by such advertisements and they

Most of them do not come out of their houses because they have a fear. They do not send their kids out. So, kids growing in such community are less active compared to kids of rich neighborhood. These kids have very high chance to become overweight. Plus, there is very limited number of health care centers in low-income community. People in such community are deprived of nutritional knowledge. They do not know the risk factors associated with obesity. They have very little knowledge on effect of obesity in their body. So, most of them do not care to prevent

Obese people have higher rates of death from heart diseases like stroke and cardiac failure. They are also susceptible to type 2 diabetes and overweight. The annual medical costs associated with obesity have been estimated as high as $ 190 billion. It is 21% of all medical spending. (Food Research and Action Center, 2010). High rate of chronic illness which are preventable in many cases increases health care costs. When people are affected by chronic illnesses, their productivity level decrease. The US chronic illness burden is only getting worst. (Bodenheimer, Chen & Benett, 2009). It increases health disparities among people. Closing gaps in health differences can lower our health expenditure. (Bentancourt, Carillo & Alexander, 2002) If we can prevent obesity, we can save big amount of