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Obesity As A Social Problem

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Obesity as a Social Problem Have you heard about obesity as a social problem and how it affects many individuals around the world? According to the World Health Organization (WHO) (2014), obesity refers to the abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that impairs health. This epidemic has become a social problem since it has affected many people around the world and creates risks to their daily lives. To give an example of how it has reached the multitudes and become an epidemic, one in four adult individuals in Canada and one in ten children are considered clinically obese, according to the Canadian Obesity Network. That means there are six million Canadians living with obesity that require immediate support to manage and control their excess weight. Moreover, in developing countries with emerging economies the rate of increase of childhood overweight and obesity has been more than 30% higher than that of developed countries (WHO, 2014). Although some segments of the society have been strenuously fighting against obesity to minimize the number of individuals affected by it and increase the individuals’ quality and length of life, the number of people affected by obesity keeps increasing annually. For example, a study made by Jef Akst (2014) found that rates of obesity rose by nearly 30 percent in adults and almost 50 percent in children worldwide, with the total number of cases with this issue has increased from 857 million in 1980 to 2.1 billion in 2013. In addition, this

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