Obesity

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75.     Food apart, the importance of physical activity, exercise and team sports should not be overlooked. Parents need to limit television and internet browsing time because this not only decreases the time available for physical activity, but also encourages consumption of fried foods, snacks and cold drinks.

 OBESITY COMPLICATIONS

Introduction

76.     Obesity is a chronic disease and its symptoms develop only gradually. Body fat may not be a direct cause of death but it is a visual marker for risk factors to health such as bad diet, abdominal fat, poor fitness, high stress or family history of disease. Obese people are often bullied and discriminated against because of the ancient fear, that fat humans may be diseased and causes their thinner counterparts to dislike them. The researchers have found that the mere sight of someone who is obese can trigger feelings of disgust and nausea similar to encountering rotten food.

77.     By itself obesity is not a killer but the penalties attached to it make life miserable. Morbid obesity becomes a “package deal” full of unwanted “bonuses”, almost always attached, in the form of all kinds of disorders known as “co-morbidities”. The statistics clearly show that obesity-related diseases have an adverse impact on both health and quality of life and that they increase your odds of dying early by up to 9 years. If your extra weight is carried around your waist, you are at an even greater risk because the abdominal fat cells secrete a hormone that directly causes inflammation of your blood vessels.

78.     The extract below from the UK House of Commons’ Health Select Committee should serve as a stern warning to the governments worldwide as to how debilitating and deadly the incidence of obesity has become: –

“Should the gloomier scenarios relating to obesity turn out to be true, the sight of amputees will become much more familiar in the streets of Britain. There will be many blind people. There will be a huge demand for kidney dialysis. The positive trends in recent decades in combating heart disease, partly the consequence of decline in smoking, will be reversed. Obesity will soon supercede tobacco as the greatest cause of premature deaths in the U.K.”