Obesity And Obesity

Obesity is an epidemic, not just in the United States, but in multiple other countries across the world. Overweight and obesity are defined as excessive fat gain that negatively impacts health. Being overweight or obese is caused by a metabolic imbalance associated with consuming more calories than the body expends therefore causing weight gain. The most commonly used tool to determine a person’s weight category is by using their body mass index. Body mass index is calculated by taking the persons’ weight and dividing it by the square of their height. A high BMI is indicative of high body fat. Using BMI, a person is determined to be overweight if their BMI is between 25<40, and Class 3 is a BMI of 40 or higher (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.). In the United States alone over 36% of adults and 17% of children and adolescents are obese (Ogden, Carroll, Fryar, & Flegal, 2015). Since the number of overweight and obese persons in the United States has drastically risen since the 1980’s studies and research have been conducted to determine things such as causes of obesity, health effects, treatments, …show more content…
The research by Ganz et al. (2014) selected adults that had been diagnosed with T2D between January 2004 and October 2011 and compared that to the adults’ BMI recorded a year prior to their T2D diagnosis. Any adults’ who didn’t have recorded BMI’s were not utilized in this study. Results from the study found that the higher a person’s BMI, the higher the risk of them having T2D, with the opposite being true as well. Though both Field et al. (2001) and Ganz et all (2014) established obesity as a risk factor of T2D, a narrative review of the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS & NHS II) in contrast found that women who weren’t even obese, but were at just a high normal BMI of 24 were 3.6 or more times at risk for developing T2D than those with a BMI of less than 22 (Hruby et al.,