Photo: JEAN-SEBASTIEN EVRARD / AFP / Getty Images
According to scientists, obesity is more than a cosmetic or aesthetic issue and should be recognized as a serious disease, whose prevalence has skyrocketed in recent years worldwide.
According to the director of Nutrition of the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition, Salvador Zubirán, in Mexico, Martha Kaufer Horwitz, It is important to recognize obesity as a complex disease with multiple risks.
The number of Americans who died of heart disease with obesity as a factor has *tripled* since 1999.
Obesity now affects 42% of all Americans, and 20% of children.
Those who glorify obesity, or denounce efforts to reduce it, are dangerous: https://t.co/iveZSHedBi
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 18, 2023
“From this, the responsibilities of both governments and health professionals can be assumed to promote early detection through prevention policies, but above all to offer comprehensive treatment,” he commented.
Furthermore, he added that obesity goes beyond excess weight, since it has a multifactorial etiology whose Causes range from individual genetics to family or community factors that end up affecting entire societies.to such a degree that it is considered a contagious social epidemic.
“There are studies and articles published in prestigious specialized journals such as the Journal of Medicine, which demonstrate how it is a disease that is spread through both social relationships and geographical proximity between people,” said Kaufer Horwitz.
So, the form of transmissionunlike infectious diseases, It is not the vectors, but the diet, physical activity, lifestylewhich ultimately are essential processes for human survival and social interaction.
The problem, he said, is from the production of foodstuffs, what is their availability in my environment that causes me to consume them and affect my individual physiology and, therefore, the energy balance. It also depends on individual or social psychology. “What do I eat when I’m sad, when I’m happy or when I’m stressed?”
“This obesity epidemic that we are experiencing today cannot be explained solely by genetic issues, because genetics take years, thousands of years to modify while environments modify more quickly. I may have a propensity or susceptibility to be obese, but there has to be something in my environment, whether individual or social, that causes it to trigger,” he emphasized.
The specialist commented that at the individual level they are three main causes that contribute to weight gain: slow metabolism, increased food consumption and reduced physical activity.
About the consequences or repercussions, he added that there are risk factors that accompany this disease and that can range from psychosocial issues – such as ddepression, anxiety and low self-esteem– even problems endocrine disorders, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, lipid disorders, hypertension, kidney and gastrointestinal disorderss, as well as one of the most frequent and difficult to detect comorbidities: fatty liver.
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