Obesity In America Essay

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America is praised as one of the greatest countries in the world. Despite this, America is unable to support a great and healthy lifestyle as it suffers from a chronic weight problem and was ranked as the 15th fattest nation in the world, with 36.2% of Americans being overweight or obese. In addition, it is believed that 70% of obese adolescents will remain obese as adults (Carlson).But healthcare costs are also increasing alongside the rate of obesity, due to obesity requiring an overutilization of resources to be dealt with. So the question is, Why is obesity in America continuing to increase alongside healthcare also becoming more and more expensive as time goes on? Through analyzing multiple economic and political angles, it is shown that …show more content…

Fast-food being easily accessible also has major contributions to the confusion when seeing the contradiction in this conflict. An example of a common misconception about obesity being that low-carb diets are the absolute solution to obesity. However, limiting food intake can lead to an increase in hunger, which in turn can lead to over-consumption of food and lack of nutrients that your body needs (OAC). Consumers are often sent wildly mixed messages when it comes to what to eat and how much and also denotes how fast-food and processed food as a whole has become a standard for Americans while those same Americans also spend over $20 billion annually on weight loss schemes (publichealth.org). With not enough information known about obesity, it’s very easy to make mistakes when providing the public information on obesity, especially in a “landscape” where we normalize things that cause obesity but spend billions trying to combat it simultaneously (publichealth.org). The limited knowledge on obesity makes it hard for people to grasp a concept on what they are actually doing when trying to become more “fit” based on common misconceptions about obesity, especially when so much information is hidden from us. One example of this being fat-free foods and their impact on health. In the past, when fat was revealed to be detrimental to health, due to the taste/preference factor, fat-free products increased in demand, but it happened to be too good to be true, as it turned out to that companies swapped animal fats for hydrogenated oils and sugar, which was just as equally unhealthy as the original animal fats (publichealth.org). Lack of information and this relationship between Americans and obesity have combined to create

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