Fast Food and Obesity Facts

– The caloric density of fast food products is fairly high so concluding that it might cause obesity is not that big a leap. A few bites and you overate already and the excess pounds are hanging from your waist. Think of fast food like a box of peanuts. It is packed with energy so the appetite stays active long after the stomach became full. You wind up clueless about your actual calorie intake.

Seduced By Fast Food

Fast food establishments are doing almost the same thing. They trick people into consuming calories way beyond what they planned to. Junk foods loaded with calories are high density relative to their weight. Since the responses of the brain are based on portion size not its energy content, its appetite control center gets mixed up and undergoes confusion. This simply proves there is a strong argument pointing to fast food causing obesity.

Many note that people consuming fast food two or more times per week add 10 or so pounds to their weight within at least one year. Such individuals also have twice the odds of becoming insulin-resistant, which is tied to diabetes. Further strengthening the belief that fast food can result in obesity are the studies declaring that the nutritional value of fast food products is low. Even more disturbing news, fast food joints now have raises the food portions, pushing their caloric content even higher.

In what may be considered an effort to preserve their reputation, some fast food outlets have started going healthy. They have added more nutritious foodstuffs like fruits, bottled water and salads. While commendable, such actions are still not that major. On the other hand, it does send a message that if fast food causes obesity, fast food restaurants do not exclude the possibility.

Fast food fanatics who consume such meals a couple or more times a week run the risk of putting on 10 pounds on top of their previous weight. Here is concrete proof of the relationship between obesity and eating fast food. Unfortunately, the fast food trend seems to have no clear end in sight as such food is now also served in most hospitals and schools.

Obesity Facts – The relationship between fast food and obesity is a fact of American life. Given this, it does seem a better use of one’s time to simply skip a visit to fast food places and start getting into a healthier way of life. Munch on celery sticks instead of snacking on Twinkies. For a drink, try switching a Pepsi with orange juice.

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Obesity Statistics

– There is a new menace in the country right now and it is called obesity. American obesity statistics has shown a rise in recent years and scientists and medical experts are starting to think fast food has something to do with it. Past decades have seen a spike in obesity rates, and fast food preference for the main diet has also gone up. The TV is one way people are bombarded with fast food ads featuring whatever is the latest menu selection of a restaurant. Most commercials target the kids, and could be behind the increase in juvenile obesity. It also does not help that nearly every street corner has a fast food chain standing on it.

Researchers have tried answering the question of how fast food consumption is related to obesity. Their findings reveal that folks who eat fast food three times or more weekly are in greater danger of pulling higher body mass index (BMI) numbers and becoming obese. Doctors use the BMI to learn what level of being overweight a person is battling with. BMIs between 25 and 30 mean someone is overweight. If it is 30 or higher, he or she could possibly be obese.

For every three individuals in this country, one is said to be obese. Two out of three are labeled overweight. Such figures are considered fairly high and a bit disturbing, especially when obesity can come with a variety of health complications. Elevated blood pressure and diabetes are two of the more common health issues that result from obesity.

Fast Food – Causing Obesity In Many

Lifestyle choices represent one major factor to examine while attempting to find out if obesity can stem from eating burgers and fries since it impacts body weight too. Most families that hit the fast food chains often tend to also be low on nutritious food supplies at home. Without fresh veggies as well as fruits and whole grains, fast food meals will have a field in the body once inside it, wreaking some serious havoc.

Other studies say slim teenagers who go for the occasional fast food meal offset their decision by limiting their calorie intake for the remainder of that particular day. Overweight and obese teenagers on the other hand, almost never make the same choice. Clearly, even though there is some semblance of proof to demonstrate that fast food is behind obesity, it can also be attributed to other choices as well as factors.

If the recent obesity statistics have you worried that obesity does stem from fast food consumption, opting to eat healthy will keep you in the clear. However, it is not really necessary that you swear off fast food forever. Have the quarter pounder treat, but balance this out with lots of healthy snacking in between. By eating healthy and being smart about diet choices, there is no need to spend sleepless nights thinking munching on fast food will turn you obese.

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Weight Loss Tips

– Genes are not the real culprit for many Americans turning obese these days. What is behind their large frames is right under their noses. Unhealthy foods are everywhere, and the heavy advertising that accompanies cheap fast food products, inviting people to sample them does not help any. Fast food consumption continues to rise and a rapid solution must be found right away. More and more Americans are getting too large for comfort, and it usually has nothing to do with self-control when eating. The atmosphere of toxic foods, specifically the numerous fast food outlets appearing all over America’s roads are actually at the root of the problem.

Obesity – It Is Happening To Americans Everywhere

Fast food obesity is hitting America hard. With rows of sweets stacked up close to convenience store checkout counters, plus multiple burger ads plastered on the walls, this is not tough to understand. What is worse, it is now possible to fill up the tank at gas stations and grab something to munch on while waiting, aggravating the already serious fast food obesity situation. Clearly, there is no quick end in sight for fast food obesity. However, these weight loss tips may be helpful in understanding the cause of obesity…

Genes and lack of discipline in choosing healthy mealls have an impact on an individual being obese. Diabetes along with other health issues may arise because of the condition. Sadly, people are losing the battle against obesity. Those happily consuming such food now are bound to pay dearly in the future. Treatment costs are often offset by the benefits. Many wind up gaining back the weight they lost.

One major factor in food obesity is the environment. It must be curbed, especially at the rate that Americans are displaying no resistance to the idea of eating huge mouthfuls of unhealthy cooking. Although genetics has a hand in it, the environment is the major player in the development of fast food obesity. Food loaded with sugar and fat is often cheaper, which makes it the practical choice for most Americans. Such foods are creating a whole new eating landscape for them.

Each cheese-egg-bacon McMuffin served comes with a large helping of fat, which is not doing the battle against fast food obesity any favors. Even worse, serving sizes for these types of food are getting bigger and bigger. With fast food ads in print, on the radio and other forms of media, the number of consumers attracted by the food also increases.

The combination of greater fast food products consumed in larger proportions and decreased physical activity makes for constantly rising fast food obesity statistics. Lots of countries like China have turned away from the old, healthier diets of their culture and wholeheartedly embraced fast food eating. The intensive advertisement certainly helped speed this phenomenon along. Proof that China has made the unhealthy diet switch lies in the country’s huge obese case numbers. These weight loss tips are only a few of the many reasons for the rapid increase in fast food obesity statistics in America.

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Fast Food Obesity

– Two out of every three Americans are presumed overweight, with one in three being obese. Clearly America is starting to have a serious problem which stems from the relationship between fast food and obesity. The body mass index (BMI) is used to determine if someone is obese or not. With obese individuals, they usually pull up BMI numbers that are 30 and above.

Other health issues can arise from being obese, including sleep apnea, diabetes, osteoarthritis and high blood pressure. Obese individuals are prone to strokes and heart attacks too if they are also suffering from coronary artery disease. With so many health risk possibilities tied to obesity, discovering its root cause along with the appropriate course of treatment is crucial. Scientists and medical professionals are now forced to take a second look at the link between American fast food and obesity.

Dinners at Home are Out, fast food is In

No one can deny the popularity of fast food products in the United States. In fact, it represents a huge portion of its diet. It is therefore not surprise that a connection between obesity and fast food in this country is now being entertained. Several studies claim that the more times people consume fast food per week, the greater the odds of having higher BMIs and becoming obese. This is extremely disturbing, especially with fast food chains practically everywhere in the country.

Families these days no longer have time for a traditional sit-down family dinner. They are all too busy with work or business and opt to have takeout because it is fast and convenient way to grab a bite. But know this: fast food meals tend to be loaded with sodium, fat, sugar and calories. Other research reveals that people who regularly stuff themselves with fast food meals seldom store nutritious food like fruits and veggies at home as a way to counteract the harmful effects of greasy foods.

Reduce fast food and Obesity Links in the States Now

People need to cut down on their diet of burgers and fries if the fast food and obesity situation in the United States is to be kept in check. There is no need to abandon fast food meals altogether, but a family will do well to keep its consumption of junk food at a minimum. Making healthier diet choices, with the occasional cheeseburger and soda are sure to do the trick.

A good grasp of nutrition and health plus making some smart diet picks, are sure to drive down the links between American food consumption and fast food obesity significantly. The key is to serve lots of whole grains along with fresh vegetables and fruits each time people have meals in the house. Diets should not feature Big Macs as mainstays, but rather as a nice random treat enjoyed infrequently. It all starts with giving up the frequent fast food binges and beginning to eat healthy.

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Not many people under stand all the Obesity risks, Being over weight and obese can start causing other serious problems such as, diabetes, hypertension, coronary arty disease, and it can also lead to serious strokes. The list doesn’t stop there people also have a higher chance of creating cancers, in the colon, rectum, and also breast, and the cervix. Not two mention the social and mental issues obesity stigma creates.The best solution is properly dieting and physical activity on a regular basis. In some serious cases there are surgeries and anti inflammatory drugs that help to reduce appetite or inhibit fat absorption. Eating healthy and exercising regular is a must. If we create a healthy way of living for younger children then there is a better change that the children will grow up healthier and eating properly. Obesity does not discriminate, nor is it sexist. Obesity can affect all people of every age, size, gender, and color.

When more people under stand the reasons for obesity, then the better educated we all can come witch means,better and more saver solutions two handle this serious problem. I hope I have helped you in under standing the situations of obesity better.

How to Prevent Obesity! Learn About Obesity Health Risk in A

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Before I begin to examine this question, let’s unpack the term “the obesity epidemic.”

If you are reading this blog, I assume you are literate enough to understand obesity and how it differs from overweight or normal weight. The media makes it QUITE clear every single day.But what is an epidemic? As someone with a BA in Journalism, I’m ashamed to report that I’ve never seen one of those freaked-out media reports explain what an “epidemic” is.

In epidemiology (which is the study of the distribution, deterrents, and determinants of disease among populations,) we consider an epidemic to be “the occurrence in a community of cases of an illness, specific health related behavior or other health related events clearly in excess of normal expectancy.” So with that introduction, the question becomes, is there an epidemic of obesity? I will limit today’s discussion to the United States; otherwise, the amount of data sets could get out of hand!

To establish whether we have an amount “clearly in excess of normal expectancy,” we need to define what “normal expectancy” means for obesity. This is typically based on historical data.In the United States, there are two primary measures of obesity prevalence used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC.) One is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES,) which is administered as a series of cross-sectional health examinations and interviews. In epidemiology, we say that cross sectional studies are designed to capture a “snapshot” of the population in the moment. Cross-sectional studies are helpful for finding prevalence, which is the number of cases of a given disease that exist in a population at a given time. NHANES is an especially good study design for examining obesity prevalence because it does not rely on self-report. Participants are actually weighed and measured on-site by trained staff members and a physician.

The other set of commonly used data is the Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance Survey administered by the CDC, which has been reporting on rates of obesity and overweight among participants since 1984 (a summary of state-specific obesity data is shown here.) However, the BRFSS relies on self-report of height and weight via telephone and so is likely to be less accurate than the NHANES. Other studies looking for a “baseline” sometimes use health and life insurance data, but this data only includes the weights/heights of policy holders so you have to ask how generalizable it is to the entire population (e.g. minorities, the poor, the unemployed, children who are not likely to have life insurance policies, etc.) The same thing applies to military data, which is simply not generalizable to everyone (see the healthy worker effect!) I’m sure there are other measures, too, but these are the ones I’ve chosen to examine today as they are the national statistics that show up most in the literature.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. NHANES was first administered in the early 1960s and focused at first on special populations or health topics. In 1999, it became a continuous program (known as a repeated measure study) administered every year to 5,000 individuals thought to be representative of our country as a whole.

This makes me wonder, can we actually examine the NHANES data from before 1999 as anything beyond “a slice” of the special populations it measured (i.e., how generalizable is this data?) This question is important because it is important to use roughly the same population (or at least the same population distribution–ages, sex, race, etc.) over a series of cross-sectional studies if we want to make a fair comparison between all of them. We can’t say that “obesity is on the rise” if we measured obesity in the Amish who are active farm workers one yearand then measured obesity in IT professionals the next year(hopefully, this is only an over-the-top exaggeration designed to make a point and not something that has actually been done.)

Based on my own understanding of epidemiology, we can’t compare completely different samples and draw any meaningful conclusions. So when we try to understand changing levels of prevalence in the population with any degree of accuracy, we can only look at NHANES data from 1999–on, and evaluate the BRFSS data from 1984–on, taking its limitations into account as we analyze it. These data sets were designed to represent the population, so it’s okay to extrapolate them to the population if we think the data sets were designed well.

I’ve seen some media reports that have used obesity data from 1960 on, and despite my best searching I cannot find studies beginning in that time period and continuing until today (using roughly the same methods, measurements, and study subjects) that I would feel comfortable generalizing to our entire population. If you are aware of any, please let me know and I will write a post on it to update everyone. So NHANES is the best measure we have. How representative of the whole population are the 5,000 people that NHANES bases our national obesity prevalence on?NHANES does make an effort to include a representative sample, and states that they over-sample those over 60, African Americans, and Hispanics in an effort to ensure reliability. There are different calculations that you can do to stratify your sample and make sure it accurately reflects the population that you’re trying to capture, and I would imagine that NHANES does this (though I couldn’t personally find an explanation about how they do it.)

So after all this – do we have an obesity epidemic?The line represents the Healthy People 2010 goal for obesity, which is that less than 15% of the population will be obese. Healthy People 2010 goals were set by a group of federal agencies and other parties who set the public health agenda for the United States every 10 years. According to one article, the obesity target was last met in 1980 (though I can’t find out where they got that information.) I would imagine they used historical data to set the goal, as discussed at the beginning of this post. If this line represents our agreed-upon target, then we have an epidemic (that’s IF you agree to this target, which seems debatable to me.) However, there is hope. In the January 2010 issue of JAMA (a high powered U.S. medical journal,) we read that the prevalence of obesity in the United States increased between 1976-1980 and 1988-1994 and again between 1988-1994 and 1999-2000. The increase in prevalence was stastistically significant for most age groups/genders.

Then women slow down. In fact, there was no statistically significant change in obesity prevalence among women in the United States from 1999 to 2008, and men also slowed down. This led the researchers to conclude that “the increases in the prevalence of obesity previously observed do not appear to be continuing at the same rate over the past 10 years, particularly for women and possibly for men.” So though there may be an obesity epidemic, the hysteria with which we have approached it in the last 2 years has likely done nothing to quell an already existing trend of stagnancy. Nor is “obesity on the rise” among all subsets of the U.S. population, as many publications want us to believe.

To summarize, many media outlets need to take a chill pill and many journalists need to attend classes in reporting on health statistics. Obesity trends are not as easy to measure as everyone seem to think, nor is our understanding of historical trends as clear-cut as many report. That being said, obesity does seem to have increased since BRFSS and NHANES continuous data collection began, and if we use the Healthy People 2010 goals for obesity prevalence in the population as our “normal expectancy” than we do have an epidemic. Also, writing these types of blog posts takes an incredible amount of time. Carrie, how did you do it several times a week?!!I would also love to hear what YOU think!*(I will not discuss BMI vs. other methods of measuring obesity and overweight today, but there are excellent articles elsewhere about this topic. I will summarize them by saying that BMI is definitely an imperfect instrument as are skinfold measurements, and that I look forward to new developments in measurement that can be easily applied on a population level. BMI and skinfold measurements have fueled the “obesity epidemic” fire and I am curious if and how this fire will dim when we apply new techniques that eliminate the problems associated with BMI and skinfold measurements and perhaps reflect a more accurate view of health.)

The Obesity Epidemic? « Bearing, Eating, Being…

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Lost in the acrimony of the health-care reform, there was one clause that all sides seem to agree on: Beginning next year, all restaurant chains with more than 20 locations will have to post calorie counts and other similar information.

Click Here to See the Unhealthiest Fast-Food Items in America

Yet the trend toward healthy eating (or at least knowing what’s in that burger) took a decisive 180-degree turn when KFC introduced its Double Down sandwich—two fried chicken fillets stuffed with bacon, cheese and a mayonnaise-based sauce—to great internet buzz and fanfare. The Double Down sounds like an artery clogging nightmare, but it’s actually not that bad, comparatively speaking. Slightly worse than a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut, slightly better than a Bonus Jack double cheeseburger from Jack in the Box, the Double Down slides into the #23 slot on our list.

Fried chicken sandwich revolutions aside, consumer health advocates are thrilled about the calorie count legislation. The Daily Beast decided to provide a preview, ranking 40 fast-food standards and classics based on which are worst for your health. We equally weighed five criteria, which were almost universally available to each of the items we measured: calories, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, and sugar.Only in America would Chicken McNuggets and large fries look like health food. But once consumers get a full dose of information, they’ll learn about the 1,330-calorie, 38-grams of saturated fat monster topping the list. Who’s the culprit? Click here. Plus: Check out Hungry Beast, for more news on the latest restaurants, hot chefs, and tasty recipes.Clark Merrefield compiled these rankings.

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The 41 Deadliest Fast-Food Meals

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