07.14.10
Obesity can Cost a Man 8 Years
Check out this article thats says obese men die about eight years earlier than non-obese men. While the article is pretty much your normal read of being overweight can be bad for your health, I found the following part quite interesting:
“As the obesity epidemic is still progressing rapidly, especially among children and adolescents, it is important to find out if obesity in early adulthood has lifelong mortality effects,” said the study’s leader, Esther Zimmermann, a researcher at the Institute of Preventive Medicine, Copenhagen University Hospital and the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen.
The “obesity epidemic”? While I do agree obesity is fairly widespread these days, I find it odd to lump it with communicable traits and diseases (with which traditionally associate the concepts of spreading and epidemics. Point being is how do you spread obesity? Everyone has the innate ability to be obese (a combination of heredity, upbringing, lifestyle, and life view). When an obese person becomes skinny, do we say the disease has gone into remission? And if we are making value judgements on what is healthy and not, we should make judgements on fast food, junk food, sweets, lack of exercise, excessive television, etc.
I decided to take a quick look at dicitonary.com, and found there is a second definition that is applicable (even though there are multiple denotations, I believe the implied connotation gives us the wrong view).
- Also, ep·i·dem·i·cal. (of a disease) affecting many persons at the same time, and spreading from person to person in a locality where the disease is not permanently prevalent.
- extremely prevalent; widespread.
I think we need to take a step back and start re-evaluating our lifestyle decisions from the ground up. Lets focus on eating healthy, and teaching our kids good eating habits. There is no concept of full and mileage with food. We need to reframe how we eat and why we eat. Eat to live, and not live to eat.