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Obesity : A Global Health Issue

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American Obesity
Mary R. Hoyle
Western Governors University

American Obesity
Obesity is a medical condition in human beings, in which the body overproduces body fats, to such an extent that the excess body fats which usually accumulates within the body, can lead to other health problems like increase in body size or the thickening of blood vessels, which may eventually lead to heart attack or high blood pressure. Obesity is a global health issue, but it’s mostly common in the west, due to the kind of life style the people live. Obese people are usually stigmatized by the society due to their health status, meaning they are viewed as being in trouble. Whether obesity is a cause or reason for such stigma, is however debatable (Vogel, 2007).

In the United States, obesity was not a major problem until the 1980s when it was viewed as a national epidemic. In the 1990s, scholars and researchers struggled to look for the causes of obesity with some scholars postulating that it could be caused by a virus which behaves like the HIV virus, while others in 2007 theorized that it could be caused by the influence of individuals by their family members to over eat, thereby becoming obese (Ibsen2006).

The fact about obesity in the United States is that it is one of the highest in the world, and has been on the increase since the late 1990s.As of 2007, about 74% of all the adults were either obese or overweight .The problem of obesity comes with high financial costs to the United

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