Obesity Statistics
These facts might amaze you!
• Obesity is a chronic disease, which can be inherited.
• Obesity increases the risk of developing high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes (type 2), stroke, gallbladder disease and cancer of the breast, prostate and colon.
• You will rarely get any help for obesity treatment from Health insurance companies despite its wide spread problem and effects on health.
• The tendency toward obesity is often due to our environment: lack of physical activity combined with high-calorie, low-cost foods.
• If maintained, even weight loss as small as 10 percent of body weight can improve one's health.
• Increased muscle mass burns calories, so, for every pound of new muscle that you gain, half a pound of fat will be burned off per month. It might not sound a lot but listen to this…if you gain 10Ibs of muscle, that will burn off an extra 5Ibs of fat per month, which equates to about 60Ibs of fat burned away per year. I will go into this fascinating fact below.
The world is facing swelling numbers of people who are overweight. In the
past decade the number of overweight people rose from 200 million in 1995
to 300 million in 2003. Even in parts of the world like Africa, clinics
for overweight people are being established. In India, 55% of women between
20 and 69 are overweight. The same goes also for 20% of adult Chinese.
The ratio of overweight children in Brazil rose by 239% in the last generation.
All in all, 1.7 billion of the world’s population is supposed to be overweight
according to the World Health Organisation. Moreover, this also significantly
affects countries’ healthcare systems.
Statistics for the USA show that obesity causes 300,000 deaths each year and costs the economy $117 billion
per year in additional health-care expenses. New York Assemblyman Felix
Ortiz, a Brooklyn Democrat has floated the idea of a fat tax. He believes
that a tax would create a small disincentive towards the consumption of
high-fat, low-nutrition foods and therefore reduce the obesity figures.
Similar suggestions have also appeared in the UK, Australia and Canada.