Health Risks Increase as Body Weight Increases

¶ … Medicine: health Risks increase in relative proportion to body weight

Executive Review

The objective of this paper is to provide a two page narrative concentrating upon illustrating a viable understanding of the deteriorative significance of the contemporaneous prevalence of obesity and overweight as two of more prolific health hazards within the U.S. It has 8 sources.

In spite of the significance and instrumentality of the exceptional degree of development and advancement that has been attained within the technologically oriented world that we contemporarily survive and interact within, health risks and disorders continue to emerge and spread rather prolifically.

Even more noteworthy, moreover, is the fact that, while the collective field of medicine does indeed address the rising problems quite effectually, a majority of the newly emerging crucial health disorders appear to be, for the larger part, avoidable disorders that are brought about as a result of self-inducement.

The current prevalence of Weight related disorders in the U.S.; Obesity & overweight

This is something that becomes especially apparent when considering it in the light of the present-day prevalence of weight related health risks and disorders such as obesity, which, in spite of possibly occurring due to heritance, largely occurs due to eating, physical activity and sleeping patterns.

This prevalence is clearly portrayed in as much as the fact that, according to the U.S. Surgeon General, 300,000 deaths per year may be attributable to obesity. Furthermore, an estimated 14% of individuals between ages 12 to 21 report no incidence of recent physical activity (Lyznicki, Young & Riggs, 2001)

Moreover, the preventability of these deaths is strongly accentuated when considering that the prime reason for the prevalence of obesity is a lack of physical activity; according the U.S. Surgeon General, around 25% of American adults are completely inactive while more than 60% are not active to the recommended degree.

The health consequences of Obesity & the safe rate of weight loss

Obesity is related to the incidence of a host of health disorders, one of the more significantly debilitative ones being that obesity dramatically increases the intrinsic tendency to contract heart disease as well as hypertension. Moreover, while extraordinary weight gain is associated with the incidence of diabetes, it is also linked with raised fat levels in the blood and decreased HDL or 'good' cholesterol (The International Obesity Task Force, 2003).

Furthermore, arthritis and cancer too, find their firmament for growth and prevalence as a result of obesity, the latter being constricted primarily, but not completely, to cancer of the colon, gall bladder, prostate, and postmenopausal breast cancer; women gaining more than 20 pounds from age 18 to midlife double (Obesity & Overweight Health Risks, 2003).