Biological Causes Of Childhood Obesity

Obesity rates in industrialized societies has spiked over the past century with the rise of food security, modern food production, as well as lifestyle choices. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 78.6 million of adults and 12.7 million children in the United States are obese. These numbers are fairly high for the population, which makes it a common problem for the United States. However, the human population did not always have this epidemic. It has been noted that, “…the prevalence of obese people has more than doubled in the last 20 years,” (Borch 2012). Even more alarming, the rate of childhood obesity has been, “…increasing rapidly in industrialized nations,” (Lazzeri 2011). So the problem with …show more content…
For this paper, biological causes include genetic changes as well as any bodily process that are not directly influenced by outside forces. The CDC claims that the genetic changes occur too slowly to be the sole responsible reason for the epidemic. However, people seem to respond to stimuli differently that suggest genes play a role in the obesity epidemic. The different stimuli include the amount of physical activity a person partakes in as well as the amount of food a person will eat. As of this moment, there is no one single gene that causes obesity. The CDC claims that obesity is the result of complex interaction among several genes and environmental known as “multifactorial obesity”. It is not necessarily that our genes or bodies that are changing, but rather how they respond to different stressors. According research done by Dr. JP Chaput, E. Doucet and A. Tremblay, “…fat gain is the result of a chronic exposure to an obesogenic lifestyle and should be seen as an adaptation that ultimately facilitates body energy storage in order to re-establish a new homeostatic state,” (Chaput 2012). The human body is trying to cope with the new stressors of the environment it is put in. Early humans had to worry about where the next meal was coming from, as well as protecting themselves from predators and weather. Today humans worry about a great deal more that leaves the body stressed and feels a need to protect its self. …show more content…
Too much food consumption would seem like the most obvious cause of obesity. However we now know that there are several complex reasons for obesity. Food production is a small but important factor in the obesity epidemic. The food society eats today compared with the food humans ate at least 100 years ago are completely different due to mass food production. Food is now made to today to have a longer shelf life in order to raise profits for the business end of food production. One way that food is made to last longer is though the use of chemicals. According to Dr. Chaput, “The production and use of synthetic chemicals have increased dramatically in parallel with obesity rates. Exposure to chemicals with endocrine-disrupting abilities has been linked to obesity development in humans,” (Chaput 2012). This is one way to explain why industrialized societies are experiencing an increase of obesity and non-industrialized are not. Along with chemically laced food, industrialized societies are usually drowning in the amount of food available while non-industrialized do not always have food security. What is happening is that people living in industrialized societies are eating too much of foods that are engulfed in synthetic chemicals that our bodies were not designed to digest. With this added stress the body again retains weight to reach another new homeostatic state to deal with