¶ … Obesity

The author makes the claim that obesity is a problem that evolves over the course of a person's entire life. Therefore, the author advocates the study of obesity as a life course study. This, the author postulates, will allow researchers to best determine where and when the key risks for obesity occur, which can direct prevention programs.

The author's support of this claim is based largely on qualitative research. There is little quantitative research presented, which reduces the effectiveness of the research. However, the qualitative research is relatively strong. The work of various academic researchers has been presented to support the claim. The main weakness of this work is that it does not derive from specific experiments that have been conducted and empirically tested.

The validity of the claim is rejected based on insufficient evidence. The qualitative evidence begins to build support for the author's claims, but not all of the threads are connected. Moreover, some of the evidence is presented with little to tie it to the main claims of the paper. For example, a significant amount of text discusses television, yet television is never empirically tied to obesity. Moreover, such an argument omits many other potentially important variables that contribute to sedentary lifestyles. For this claim to be accepted, more evidence would need to be presented and all of the presented evidence should be directly and empirically related back to the premise.

The directly related evidence pertains to metabolic syndrome rates, triggers and its links to lifestyle. There are also several implications made. For example, a correlation between poverty and obesity is noted, but the causal link is made merely with anecdotal evidence. This infers a causal relationship, but does not prove it. The same is done with television, which is presented as a causal factor in obesity, especially in children, a claim not supported by any study.