Obesity is a worldwide health epidemic and a key public health concern in the United States. It is an especially significant concern in the health of women, given that 64.1 % of women in the U.S. are overweight or obese. Obesity is an issue caused by poor diet and lack of exercise as well as genetic factors. The cases where genetic factors bring about obesity are small in comparison to those cases where improper diet and lack of exercise are the cause. Obesity stigma has been linked to poor health outcomes on an individual and population basis .In the United States, more than one third of all women are obese. The prevalence of obesity has grown immensely in the United States in last 20 years that it has replaced smoking as the number one preventable disease. Women in the United States encounter daily messages about food, body weight, and the ideal image of beauty as a very slim, usually White, woman. Urged to purchase and eat the many convenient foods so easily available, women simultaneously receive contrary messages to obtain and maintain a very slender body size through whatever means necessary. Those means include, but are not limited to, diets, …show more content…
According to the most recent data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS),[1] 20.2% of men (19.6 million) and 19.4% of women (19.2 million) were clinically obese (body mass index [BMI] _30 kg/m2 ), and 6.5% of men (6.3 million) and 8.2% of women (8.7 million) reported having diagnosed diabetes. Obesity and type 2 diabetes are particularly detrimental to women's health. Women with a higher degree of abdominal obesity are especially susceptible to type 2 diabetes, and diabetic women have disproportionally higher relative risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) than diabetic men.[2] In this paper, we review the relationship between obesity and metabolic syndrome, chronic diseases, and mortality, with particular emphasis on