Obesity Is Killing US
sxc.hu | author: Justyna Furmanczyk
“Losing weight would improve your health” – I was telling my patient last week during a consultation. His light-hearted response concerned me: “I am not obese, doctor, you’re too skinny. Everybody in my neighborhood is this size. And I like being big.”
Everyone in his neighborhood is indeed getting bigger. As the average size of the typical American grows each year, so does the tolerance for being big. I am concerned that our mass media “experts” have taken the social stigma out of fatness and made people blissfully ignorant of its health risks. Advertising, television programs, and movies that promote obesity as normal directly ignore its threat to health and well being.
Everyday I try to educate my patients about healthy eating, physical activity and healthy weight. In just 15 short minutes at my office I am trying to undo years of bad habits and billions of dollars worth of strategic marketing. As a physician I wish to offer more to my patients than those 15 minutes in my office, but unfortunately my time is heavily outweighed by my competition. Americans are bombarded on a daily basis by fast food, alcohol, and snack food advertisements. It is built into the fabric of our very lifestyles. Convenience over quality is the norm, where busy families are constantly consuming foods too high in fat and with completely unbalanced nutritional value. Even some convenience foods commonly viewed as healthy have hidden fat-producing or potential cancer-causing ingredients. It is a sad fact that most people in this country have no idea what a healthy diet really is, nor do they understand proper portion sizes.
The catastrophic consequence of health illiteracy is our current obesity pandemic. Carl Sagan once said
“When governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic — however sympathetic we may be for those who have bought the baloney.”
Americans are being fed the lie that it is okay to be fat, and this health illiteracy is damaging not only to people who are obese, but also to the healthy population of the United States.
I am not obese – why should I be concerned?
Being overweight or obese increases the risk of illness. Morbid obesity and obesity-related illness can result in decreased job performance, in some cases – to disability, job loss. Thus, those people will not have medical insurance, and may not have means to support themselves.
For example, diabetes in obese and overweight people is almost always considered a “pre-existing condition” by insurance companies, and thus a lot of those patients cannot afford the medical coverage. Having no means to treat diabetes early in the course of the disease, when severe complications (such as impaired vision, kidney failure, and others) are preventable, these patients frequently ignore their disease and end up having disabling complications. They are caught in a vicious cycle:
Given this example a number of people with severe complications of obesity will need public assistance not only for their medical care but also for activities of daily living. So functionally some of morbidly obese people become disabled and unable to support themselves. And that is where taxpayers money is used to care for obesity complications. Article continues on next page…
