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Obesity


Obesity is the excess accumulation of body fat. A person can be overweight and not obese. For example a body builder who has a lot of muscle is not considered to be obese. However most people that are overweight are also obese. Obesity is most often defined as being 20% or more over ideal body weight. Obesity is considered a serious disease and has been linked to shortened life expectancy. Obesity is known to cause many health risks such as Hypertension, Cancer, and premature death. Overweight young people (20-45) have a six times higher incidence of hypertension than do peers who are normal weight. Hypertension is known to cause!.
             high blood pressure, a contributor to stroke and heart disease. Obesity in men is known to raise the risk of colon, rectum, and prostate cancer. Obese women have a higher risk of cancer of the breast, cervix, uterus, and ovaries.
             Most nutritionists will say that adolescent obesity is due to lack of parental guidance and nothing else. Parents should teach their children proper eating habits so that they won't run across problems in the future (Tomlin 758). However, scientists are still debating on what the really causes obesity. Perhaps the simplest answer would be that children are not as active as they were centuries ago. Another answer is eating foods high in fat food or containing many too calories; certainly this is a factor for many of America's youth today. Yet fat consumption has dropped from 36 to 34 percent of total calories in the last decade. (Berg 105) The true nature of obesity is still not fully understood. Several factors seem to come into play, poor dietary habits, genetic makeup, family lifestyle, socioeconomic status, and child's ethnicity.
             Heredity has strong influence on adolescent obesity. A child with two overweight parents has 80 percent chance of becoming overweight, in one analysis, compared with 14 percent for the child of two normal weight parents (Berg 107).


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