subject: Obesity Treatment [print this page] Obesity Treatment Obesity Treatment
Obesity is an abnormal accumulation of body fat. A person is said to be obese or overweight when he/she has additional body fat above the ideal body weight; 20-40% over ideal body weight is considered mildly obese; 40-100% over ideal body weight is considered moderately obese; and 100% over ideal body weight is considered severely or morbidly obese. The reasons for the development of obesity are many. Obesity is a multifactorial symptom resulting from complex interactions between a genetic and more or less conducive environment in which it operates. Indeed, the heritability of fatness is undeniable. While the increasing popularity of obesity surgery is a clear reflection of the inability of most obese patients to comply with conventional dietary treatments, the question remains: does this type of surgical treatment offer an effective solution for severe clinical obesity? To understand the issues raised by this question, let us examine the problem of obesity and how surgery attempts to reduce it. This is serious stuff. It's not a laughing matter. The obesity rate in the states isn't just affecting adults either. The numbers for children's obesity levels are rising rapidly as well. Today there are well over 9 million adolescents who are overweight, these children and adolescents are at a much higher risk of developing obesity and morbid obesity. Obesity is simply fatness in a degree higher than being overweight. The energy intake coming from food is stored as fat because the body does not use it. Obesity has quite an impact in one's physical health that many degenerative diseases are directly and indirectly linked to obesity as observed in the history of obesity. These 2 of course are the main causes since we are bombarded daily with plenty of high calorie food, but because of our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, we don't exercise at all or don't do enough exercise, so we struggle real hard not to get fat. Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, and Katherine Battle Horgen, in their book Food Fight, published in 2004: "In the United States, obesity now contributes more to chronic illness and health care costs than does smoking. However, we will also analyze the ways in which weight loss can not only reduce the risk of premature death and certain diseases, but also improve upon many secondary health conditions associated with obesity. Obesity is the major cause of type 2 diabetes and is associated with high triglycerides and decreased HDL cholesterol. Insulin resistance can also be attributed to obesity. Insulin is the hormone that regulates blood sugar. Obesity is a killer because of the broad range of other diseases which it causes or makes worse.
