What causes obesity? If being overweight is such a bad thing, why are so many Americans so heavy? A long time ago, when food was hard to find, people had to work hard to eat. Some people were hunter-gatherers, and they had to chase animals around to catch them for food. Other people had to move from place to place as they gathered up all the resources in each spot or as the animals they were hunting moved on.
Other people were farmers and they had to work hard in the fields to make things grow. Either way, people used up a lot of energy to bring food to the table. Food was used as a fuel (the way you put gas in a car to make it go). Any food that wasn’t burned up right away in your daily activities was stored by your body for times when it would be harder to find food, like winter or times of drought. Over time, though, the way we get food has gotten easier. Most of us don’t need to hunt wild animals or gather berries in the woods for our dinner. And very few of us live on farms where we have to take care of our animals or work in the fields.
Today most of us hunt for food in the grocery store and gather it off the shelves. We live in places where we drive or take public transportation to the grocery stores. We buy food that someone else has made. Often times, we just have to pop it into the microwave, and we don’t even have to work in the kitchen to have a meal.
While this is really good for letting us do other things we’d rather spend time on, it’s not how our bodies are meant to work.
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Bad Eating Habits
Natural and healthy foods are best for the human body. But let’s face it; few of us actually eat only foods you can find in nature. These days, it’s actually hard work to find, prepare, and eat only those foods. It’s much easier (and cheaper!) to find a candy bar or a soda at the local corner market than it is to buy an apple or a cup of yogurt.
For most of us, eating unhealthy things every once in a while won’t hurt us. What will hurt us is when we eat them regularly. The main link between our eating habits and obesity is how much food we eat. Back when people were farmers or hunter-gatherers, they didn’t have easy access to food and so people ate small portions and few meals a day. As it became easier to get food, people began eating more meals and bigger portions.
In fact, even over the last 30 years, portions have gotten bigger. Twenty years ago a bagel was three inches in diameter and contained 140 calories. Today’s bagel is twice that size and contains 21/2 times the calories. And at fast food restaurants and movie theaters today the small-sized soda is the same size as our parents’ large size. But just because times (and portion sizes) have changed doesn’t mean the body’s way of reacting to food has. The basic unit of energy in food is called a calorie.
All the foods you eat have different amounts of calories. But one calorie in one food is equal to one calorie in another food. And a calorie of protein is the same as a calorie of fat. In other words, a chocolate cake calorie is the same as a collard green calorie. (Chocolate cake has a lot more calories than collard greens, though!)
After you eat food, it moves to the stomach to be digested. All the activities you take part in use up different amounts of calories or energy. Even the things your body does that you don’t have to think about—growth, thought, movement, breathing—use up energy. The body works best when it has a balance between what goes into the body and what the body puts out. In other words, you should try
to eat about the same number of calories your body will use up. How many calories we use depends on three things:
1. How much muscle we have.
Our muscles use energy all the time, and they use up the majority of the calories we should put into our body.
2. How much we weigh.
It takes energy to move each pound from place to place.
3. How far we go.
Moving our bodies takes energy. Walking requires more energy than standing still because we move our bodies over a distance. Running for 10 minutes uses more energy than walking 10 minutes. But running two miles and walking two miles use up almost the same amount of energy because you have traveled the same distance.
Most of us, though, tend to put in more calories than we use up. We eat big portions, or we snack on foods that are high in calories, or we eat all the time. In fact, Americans tend to eat 3,800 calories a day—nearly twice the average amount we should. When we consume more calories than our body can use up, the body thinks we are trying to store those calories for later and converts them into fat cells. One pound of fat is only 3,500 excess calories. (You have to use up an additional 500 calories above what you consumed every day of the week just to lose one pound!)
Store too many extra calories and have too much fat, and you’re at risk of becoming overweight or obese. Our bodies need certain kinds of nutrients in our food because they provide important things to keep us healthy. We need proteins (made up of amino acids) to grow, build and keep up the body's organs, tissues, and muscles, and to help with digestion. We need carbohydrates, which provide energy. We need certain types of dietary fat to grow and develop as babies, to insulate the body, to create some hormones, to absorb some vitamins, and to have healthy hair, skin, and hearts.
In addition to just plain eating too much, we also eat too much of the wrong things, in particular sugar and fats. Americans have a sweet tooth. We start the day with sugary cereals. We like desserts. We eat lots of sweet snacks.
Sugar is a carbohydrate, as are starches and fiber. Carbohydrates (or carbs for short) provide energy for the body, especially the brain and the nervous system. The liver breaks down all carbohydrates into glucose (blood sugar), which the body uses for energy.
There are two types of carbs: simple and complex. The body processes simple carbs quickly converting them with ease to a source of energy. Natural simple sugars source include fruits and fruit juices, milk products, and some vegetables.
Refined sugars, such as table sugar, candy bars, and soda, are not healthy though they are also simple carbs, but while they provide calories, they don’t add anything else your body needs, like vitamins, minerals, or fiber.
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Complex carbohydrates, found in foods like beans, whole grain bread and cereal, and starchy vegetables give your body not only calories but also vitamins, minerals, and fiber. They take longer for the liver to break down and leave you feeling full longer. (Foods like white bread and white rice have been processed, contain less fiber and more simple sugars, and will not keep you feeling full for as long).
The other things we tend to have too much of in our diets are the bad kinds of fat. We eat foods that are cooked in animal-based fats (butter or lard). We eat fatty cuts of meat. We eat ice cream and put half-and-half in our coffee. There are four different types of fats in our diet. The first two are unsaturated fats (monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats) and are found in olives and olive oil, most nuts, avocados, fish, and most liquid cooking oils, such as corn and soybean.
These types of fats give us a good balance of cholesterol in our bloodstream. The fats that increase our bad cholesterol level are saturated fats and trans fatty acids. Saturated fats are found in whole milk and other dairy products, red meat, chocolate, and coconuts. Trans fatty acids are the fats that were invented in order to eat less saturated fat and to give foods a longer shelf life. They are the worst type of fat you can eat, and you should try not to include them in your diet.
Trans fats include partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, vegetable shortening, and most margarines. They’re found in anything deep-fried, like french fries, and any other fast foods, as well as most baked goods you buy at the store (and at many
bakeries).
Metabolism
The chemical processes of maintaining and sustaining your body are called your metabolism. Metabolism includes digestion, waste elimination, breathing, circulation, and temperature regulation. By the time adults enter their 30s, their metabolism naturally begins to slow and the body becomes less efficient at processing calories. This slowdown can be reduced, however, by increasing muscle building exercise and physical activity.
A lack of exercise
As we’ve already talked about, your body works best when it is using up the same number of calories you’re putting into it. Those farmers and hunter-gatherers used up a lot of energy getting their food and preparing it. Today, we live a very sedentary lifestyle. In other words, we don’t get up and move enough. Technology and modern life have made things very easy for us. We have remote controls for our TVs and our stereos so we don’t have to get up to change the channel. We can pop food into the microwave and go watch TV while dinner cooks instead of standing in the kitchen for hours. We can drive or ride public transportation instead of walking to work, school, or the shopping center. We sit in front of computers, TVs, or video games all day.
We ride elevators to get to our apartments or offices instead of taking the stairs. The statistics are stunning. Nearly 38% of all Americans get no exercise at all. Nearly 55% of Native Americans, 52% of Latinos, and 50% of African Americans report that they are inactive. People who haven’t graduated from high school and who lack a GED are even worse off—61% of them get no exercise—as well as 55% of poor people. People who live in the city get more exercise than people outside a city area. Geographically, Southerners are 8% less active than people in the rest of the country.
The good news among the numbers? Without exception, people are slowly becoming more active. Sometimes we don’t get enough exercise by choice. We choose to take the elevator instead of the stairs. We prefer watching TV to going outside to the park.
Other times, things that are out of our control make getting exercise harder. We live in a town where there are no sidewalks. Our neighborhood is dangerous and kids shouldn’t play outside. We have a health condition that makes it hard to exercise. We can’t find the time to exercise between working two jobs.
Genetics
Health research has shown that genetics is linked to obesity and the health conditions it can cause. Genetics is the field of science that looks at how genes are passed down from one generation to another to influence traits. Some people have a genetic predisposition to a certain disease if there is a history of the disease developing in members of their family or in people from their same ethnic background.
Obesity seems to run in families. Some of that can be attributed to similar lifestyles and eating habits. But not all of it. For instance, while having two obese parents makes a child six times more likely to become obese himself, having only one obese parent still makes a child twice as likely as children of non-obese parents to be obese. Genetics works in other ways, too.
Fat cells produce an appetite-controlling hormone, leptin, which is supposed to tell the brain that the body is full. When you have fever fat cells, less leptin is produced and the brain believes it needs to eat. Most obese people have higher leptin levels than average, which should mean that their bodies don’t want to eat. But somewhere in their bodies, the message from the leptins gets lost. Scientists think that a person’s genes could cause this malfunction.
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