Obesity In Today's Society

Obesity is a sensitive subject. Obesity is something everyone sees, but in social circles, not many like to talk about. In today’s society, many people are overweight and it looks like society has come to accept heavy weight people as normal people with no particular problems. It is totally unacceptable to call anyone fat or much less obese. Most people just accept that some people are heavier or “bigger” than others. It is rare not to see overweight people and even obese people in everyday environments from work, to school, shopping, movies, television and everywhere in between. Some people say obesity is a disease. Some say it’s the way human bodies were programmed to survive that makes people fat. However, many think it is just …show more content…
These products and ideas are everywhere you look from the library, to the internet to stores and even on television. Even then, a large number of people continue to battle with their weight.
Obesity by definition, according to The American Heritage College Dictionary, is “the condition of being obese; extremely fat; grossly overweight”. This problem or condition is very common in the U.S. since about one third of adults are obese (MacMillan). However, being obese has effects beyond simply being fat. According to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “…obesity is connected to …show more content…
Some experts believe that genetics and the way human bodies function determine who is obese or not. In other words, the choices in food and physical activity are not was makes people overweight. According to a researcher David Linden obesity is not merely a matter of willpower. “Here’s the root of the problem: Evolution is slow, but cultures and technology can change quickly. For most of our human history we rarely had access to sweet or fatty foods. We belonged to hunter-gatherer societies and burned a lot of energy in everyday tasks. Our appetites are calibrated to a diet or roots and shoots and very little meats or sweets –not the McDonald’s Extra Value Meal and a 64 –once soda.” (Linden) Researchers like Linden believe that millions of year ago, the humans would gain weight during periods when there was a lot of food available in order to be ready for periods when no food would available (famines). In this way, they would not die of starvation. However, today when we overeat and gain weight, since there is no famine periods with no food available, the extra weight just packs on. And it keeps packing on since no famine arrives and Americans do not have to put a lot of physical activity to gather their food. They just go the grocery store, order groceries online, order delivery food, or drive-thru McDonalds and order the super-sized