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Essay on Obesity

List of essays on obesity, essay on obesity – short essay (essay 1 – 150 words), essay on obesity (essay 2 – 250 words), essay on obesity – written in english (essay 3 – 300 words), essay on obesity – for school students (class 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 standard) (essay 4 – 400 words), essay on obesity – for college students (essay 5 – 500 words), essay on obesity – with causes and treatment (essay 6 – 600 words), essay on obesity – for science students (essay 7 – 750 words), essay on obesity – long essay for medical students (essay 8 – 1000 words).

Obesity is a chronic health condition in which the body fat reaches abnormal level. Obesity occurs when we consume much more amount of food than our body really needs on a daily basis. In other words, when the intake of calories is greater than the calories we burn out, it gives rise to obesity.

Audience: The below given essays are exclusively written for school students (Class 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 Standard), college, science and medical students.

Introduction:

Obesity means being excessively fat. A person would be said to be obese if his or her body mass index is beyond 30. Such a person has a body fat rate that is disproportionate to his body mass.

Obesity and the Body Mass Index:

The body mass index is calculated considering the weight and height of a person. Thus, it is a scientific way of determining the appropriate weight of any person. When the body mass index of a person indicates that he or she is obese, it exposes the person to make health risk.

Stopping Obesity:

There are two major ways to get the body mass index of a person to a moderate rate. The first is to maintain a strict diet. The second is to engage in regular physical exercise. These two approaches are aimed at reducing the amount of fat in the body.

Conclusion:

Obesity can lead to sudden death, heart attack, diabetes and may unwanted illnesses. Stop it by making healthy choices.

Obesity has become a big concern for the youth of today’s generation. Obesity is defined as a medical condition in which an individual gains excessive body fat. When the Body Mass Index (BMI) of a person is over 30, he/ she is termed as obese.

Obesity can be a genetic problem or a disorder that is caused due to unhealthy lifestyle habits of a person. Physical inactivity and the environment in which an individual lives, are also the factors that leads to obesity. It is also seen that when some individuals are in stress or depression, they start cultivating unhealthy eating habits which eventually leads to obesity. Medications like steroids is yet another reason for obesity.

Obesity has several serious health issues associated with it. Some of the impacts of obesity are diabetes, increase of cholesterol level, high blood pressure, etc. Social impacts of obesity includes loss of confidence in an individual, lowering of self-esteem, etc.

The risks of obesity needs to be prevented. This can be done by adopting healthy eating habits, doing some physical exercise regularly, avoiding stress, etc. Individuals should work on weight reduction in order to avoid obesity.

Obesity is indeed a health concern and needs to be prioritized. The management of obesity revolves around healthy eating habits and physical activity. Obesity, if not controlled in its initial stage can cause many severe health issues. So it is wiser to exercise daily and maintain a healthy lifestyle rather than being the victim of obesity.

Obesity can be defined as the clinical condition where accumulation of excessive fat takes place in the adipose tissue leading to worsening of health condition. Usually, the fat is deposited around the trunk and also the waist of the body or even around the periphery.

Obesity is actually a disease that has been spreading far and wide. It is preventable and certain measures are to be taken to curb it to a greater extend. Both in the developing and developed countries, obesity has been growing far and wide affecting the young and the old equally.

The alarming increase in obesity has resulted in stimulated death rate and health issues among the people. There are several methods adopted to lose weight and they include different diet types, physical activity and certain changes in the current lifestyle. Many of the companies are into minting money with the concept of inviting people to fight obesity.

In patients associated with increased risk factor related to obesity, there are certain drug therapies and other procedures adopted to lose weight. There are certain cost effective ways introduced by several companies to enable clinic-based weight loss programs.

Obesity can lead to premature death and even cause Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus. Cardiovascular diseases have also become the part and parcel of obese people. It includes stroke, hypertension, gall bladder disease, coronary heart disease and even cancers like breast cancer, prostate cancer, endometrial cancer and colon cancer. Other less severe arising due to obesity includes osteoarthritis, gastro-esophageal reflux disease and even infertility.

Hence, serious measures are to be taken to fight against this dreadful phenomenon that is spreading its wings far and wide. Giving proper education on benefits of staying fit and mindful eating is as important as curbing this issue. Utmost importance must be given to healthy eating habits right from the small age so that they follow the same until the end of their life.

Obesity is majorly a lifestyle disease attributed to the extra accumulation of fat in the body leading to negative health effects on a person. Ironically, although prevalent at a large scale in many countries, including India, it is one of the most neglect health problems. It is more often ignored even if told by the doctor that the person is obese. Only when people start acquiring other health issues such as heart disease, blood pressure or diabetes, they start taking the problem of obesity seriously.

Obesity Statistics in India:

As per a report, India happens to figure as the third country in the world with the most obese people. This should be a troubling fact for India. However, we are yet to see concrete measures being adopted by the people to remain fit.

Causes of Obesity:

Sedentary lifestyle, alcohol, junk food, medications and some diseases such as hypothyroidism are considered as the factors which lead to obesity. Even children seem to be glued to televisions, laptops and video games which have taken away the urge for physical activities from them. Adding to this, the consumption of junk food has further aggravated the growing problem of obesity in children.

In the case of adults, most of the professions of today make use of computers which again makes people sit for long hours in one place. Also, the hectic lifestyle of today makes it difficult for people to spare time for physical activities and people usually remain stressed most of the times. All this has contributed significantly to the rise of obesity in India.

Obesity and BMI:

Body Mass Index (BMI) is the measure which allows a person to calculate how to fit he or she is. In other words, the BMI tells you if you are obese or not. BMI is calculated by dividing the weight of a person in kg with the square of his / her height in metres. The number thus obtained is called the BMI. A BMI of less than 25 is considered optimal. However, if a person has a BMI over 30 he/she is termed as obese.

What is a matter of concern is that with growing urbanisation there has been a rapid increase of obese people in India? It is of utmost importance to consider this health issue a serious threat to the future of our country as a healthy body is important for a healthy soul. We should all be mindful of what we eat and what effect it has on our body. It is our utmost duty to educate not just ourselves but others as well about this serious health hazard.

Obesity can be defined as a condition (medical) that is the accumulation of body fat to an extent that the excess fat begins to have a lot of negative effects on the health of the individual. Obesity is determined by examining the body mass index (BMI) of the person. The BMI is gotten by dividing the weight of the person in kilogram by the height of the person squared.

When the BMI of a person is more than 30, the person is classified as being obese, when the BMI falls between 25 and 30, the person is said to be overweight. In a few countries in East Asia, lower values for the BMI are used. Obesity has been proven to influence the likelihood and risk of many conditions and disease, most especially diabetes of type 2, cardiovascular diseases, sleeplessness that is obstructive, depression, osteoarthritis and some cancer types.

In most cases, obesity is caused through a combination of genetic susceptibility, a lack of or inadequate physical activity, excessive intake of food. Some cases of obesity are primarily caused by mental disorder, medications, endocrine disorders or genes. There is no medical data to support the fact that people suffering from obesity eat very little but gain a lot of weight because of slower metabolism. It has been discovered that an obese person usually expends much more energy than other people as a result of the required energy that is needed to maintain a body mass that is increased.

It is very possible to prevent obesity with a combination of personal choices and social changes. The major treatments are exercising and a change in diet. We can improve the quality of our diet by reducing our consumption of foods that are energy-dense like those that are high in sugars or fat and by trying to increase our dietary fibre intake.

We can also accompany the appropriate diet with the use of medications to help in reducing appetite and decreasing the absorption of fat. If medication, exercise and diet are not yielding any positive results, surgery or gastric balloon can also be carried out to decrease the volume of the stomach and also reduce the intestines’ length which leads to the feel of the person get full early or a reduction in the ability to get and absorb different nutrients from a food.

Obesity is the leading cause of ill-health and death all over the world that is preventable. The rate of obesity in children and adults has drastically increased. In 2015, a whopping 12 percent of adults which is about 600 million and about 100 million children all around the world were found to be obese.

It has also been discovered that women are more obese than men. A lot of government and private institutions and bodies have stated that obesity is top of the list of the most difficult and serious problems of public health that we have in the world today. In the world we live today, there is a lot of stigmatisation of obese people.

We all know how troubling the problem of obesity truly is. It is mainly a form of a medical condition wherein the body tends to accumulate excessive fat which in turn has negative repercussions on the health of an individual.

Given the current lifestyle and dietary style, it has become more common than ever. More and more people are being diagnosed with obesity. Such is its prevalence that it has been termed as an epidemic in the USA. Those who suffer from obesity are at a much higher risk of diabetes, heart diseases and even cancer.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of obesity, it is important to learn what the key causes of obesity are. In a layman term, if your calorie consumption exceeds what you burn because of daily activities and exercises, it is likely to lead to obesity. It is caused over a prolonged period of time when your calorie intake keeps exceeding the calories burned.

Here are some of the key causes which are known to be the driving factors for obesity.

If your diet tends to be rich in fat and contains massive calorie intake, you are all set to suffer from obesity.

Sedentary Lifestyle:

With most people sticking to their desk jobs and living a sedentary lifestyle, the body tends to get obese easily.

Of course, the genetic framework has a lot to do with obesity. If your parents are obese, the chance of you being obese is quite high.

The weight which women gain during their pregnancy can be very hard to shed and this is often one of the top causes of obesity.

Sleep Cycle:

If you are not getting an adequate amount of sleep, it can have an impact on the hormones which might trigger hunger signals. Overall, these linked events tend to make you obese.

Hormonal Disorder:

There are several hormonal changes which are known to be direct causes of obesity. The imbalance of the thyroid stimulating hormone, for instance, is one of the key factors when it comes to obesity.

Now that we know the key causes, let us look at the possible ways by which you can handle it.

Treatment for Obesity:

As strange as it may sound, the treatment for obesity is really simple. All you need to do is follow the right diet and back it with an adequate amount of exercise. If you can succeed in doing so, it will give you the perfect head-start into your journey of getting in shape and bidding goodbye to obesity.

There are a lot of different kinds and styles of diet plans for obesity which are available. You can choose the one which you deem fit. We recommend not opting for crash dieting as it is known to have several repercussions and can make your body terribly weak.

The key here is to stick to a balanced diet which can help you retain the essential nutrients, minerals, and, vitamins and shed the unwanted fat and carbs.

Just like the diet, there are several workout plans for obesity which are available. It is upon you to find out which of the workout plan seems to be apt for you. Choose cardio exercises and dance routines like Zumba to shed the unwanted body weight. Yoga is yet another method to get rid of obesity.

So, follow a blend of these and you will be able to deal with the trouble of obesity in no time. We believe that following these tips will help you get rid of obesity and stay in shape.

Obesity and overweight is a top health concern in the world due to the impact it has on the lives of individuals. Obesity is defined as a condition in which an individual has excessive body fat and is measured using the body mass index (BMI) such that, when an individual’s BMI is above 30, he or she is termed obese. The BMI is calculated using body weight and height and it is different for all individuals.

Obesity has been determined as a risk factor for many diseases. It results from dietary habits, genetics, and lifestyle habits including physical inactivity. Obesity can be prevented so that individuals do not end up having serious complications and health problems. Chronic illnesses like diabetes, heart diseases and relate to obesity in terms of causes and complications.

Factors Influencing Obesity:

Obesity is not only as a result of lifestyle habits as most people put it. There are other important factors that influence obesity. Genetics is one of those factors. A person could be born with genes that predispose them to obesity and they will also have difficulty in losing weight because it is an inborn factor.

The environment also influences obesity because the diet is similar in certain environs. In certain environments, like school, the food available is fast foods and the chances of getting healthy foods is very low, leading to obesity. Also, physical inactivity is an environmental factor for obesity because some places have no fields or tracks where people can jog or maybe the place is very unsafe and people rarely go out to exercise.

Mental health affects the eating habits of individuals. There is a habit of stress eating when a person is depressed and it could result in overweight or obesity if the person remains unhealthy for long period of time.

The overall health of individuals also matter. If a person is unwell and is prescribed with steroids, they may end up being obese. Steroidal medications enable weight gain as a side effect.

Complications of Obesity:

Obesity is a health concern because its complications are severe. Significant social and health problems are experienced by obese people. Socially, they will be bullied and their self-esteem will be low as they will perceive themselves as unworthy.

Chronic illnesses like diabetes results from obesity. Diabetes type 2 has been directly linked to obesity. This condition involves the increased blood sugars in the body and body cells are not responding to insulin as they should. The insulin in the body could also be inadequate due to decreased production. High blood sugar concentrations result in symptoms like frequent hunger, thirst and urination. The symptoms of complicated stages of diabetes type 2 include loss of vision, renal failure and heart failure and eventually death. The importance of having a normal BMI is the ability of the body to control blood sugars.

Another complication is the heightened blood pressures. Obesity has been defined as excessive body fat. The body fat accumulates in blood vessels making them narrow. Narrow blood vessels cause the blood pressures to rise. Increased blood pressure causes the heart to start failing in its physiological functions. Heart failure is the end result in this condition of increased blood pressures.

There is a significant increase in cholesterol in blood of people who are obese. High blood cholesterol levels causes the deposition of fats in various parts of the body and organs. Deposition of fats in the heart and blood vessels result in heart diseases. There are other conditions that result from hypercholesterolemia.

Other chronic illnesses like cancer can also arise from obesity because inflammation of body cells and tissues occurs in order to store fats in obese people. This could result in abnormal growths and alteration of cell morphology. The abnormal growths could be cancerous.

Management of Obesity:

For the people at risk of developing obesity, prevention methods can be implemented. Prevention included a healthy diet and physical activity. The diet and physical activity patterns should be regular and realizable to avoid strains that could result in complications.

Some risk factors for obesity are non-modifiable for example genetics. When a person in genetically predisposed, the lifestyle modifications may be have help.

For the individuals who are already obese, they can work on weight reduction through healthy diets and physical exercises.

In conclusion, obesity is indeed a major health concern because the health complications are very serious. Factors influencing obesity are both modifiable and non-modifiable. The management of obesity revolves around diet and physical activity and so it is important to remain fit.

In olden days, obesity used to affect only adults. However, in the present time, obesity has become a worldwide problem that hits the kids as well. Let’s find out the most prevalent causes of obesity.

Factors Causing Obesity:

Obesity can be due to genetic factors. If a person’s family has a history of obesity, chances are high that he/ she would also be affected by obesity, sooner or later in life.

The second reason is having a poor lifestyle. Now, there are a variety of factors that fall under the category of poor lifestyle. An excessive diet, i.e., eating more than you need is a definite way to attain the stage of obesity. Needless to say, the extra calories are changed into fat and cause obesity.

Junk foods, fried foods, refined foods with high fats and sugar are also responsible for causing obesity in both adults and kids. Lack of physical activity prevents the burning of extra calories, again, leading us all to the path of obesity.

But sometimes, there may also be some indirect causes of obesity. The secondary reasons could be related to our mental and psychological health. Depression, anxiety, stress, and emotional troubles are well-known factors of obesity.

Physical ailments such as hypothyroidism, ovarian cysts, and diabetes often complicate the physical condition and play a massive role in abnormal weight gain.

Moreover, certain medications, such as steroids, antidepressants, and contraceptive pills, have been seen interfering with the metabolic activities of the body. As a result, the long-term use of such drugs can cause obesity. Adding to that, regular consumption of alcohol and smoking are also connected to the condition of obesity.

Harmful Effects of Obesity:

On the surface, obesity may look like a single problem. But, in reality, it is the mother of several major health issues. Obesity simply means excessive fat depositing into our body including the arteries. The drastic consequence of such high cholesterol levels shows up in the form of heart attacks and other life-threatening cardiac troubles.

The fat deposition also hampers the elasticity of the arteries. That means obesity can cause havoc in our body by altering the blood pressure to an abnormal range. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Obesity is known to create an endless list of problems.

In extreme cases, this disorder gives birth to acute diseases like diabetes and cancer. The weight gain due to obesity puts a lot of pressure on the bones of the body, especially of the legs. This, in turn, makes our bones weak and disturbs their smooth movement. A person suffering from obesity also has higher chances of developing infertility issues and sleep troubles.

Many obese people are seen to be struggling with breathing problems too. In the chronic form, the condition can grow into asthma. The psychological effects of obesity are another serious topic. You can say that obesity and depression form a loop. The more a person is obese, the worse is his/ her depression stage.

How to Control and Treat Obesity:

The simplest and most effective way, to begin with, is changing our diet. There are two factors to consider in the diet plan. First is what and what not to eat. Second is how much to eat.

If you really want to get rid of obesity, include more and more green vegetables in your diet. Spinach, beans, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, etc., have enough vitamins and minerals and quite low calories. Other healthier options are mushrooms, pumpkin, beetroots, and sweet potatoes, etc.

Opt for fresh fruits, especially citrus fruits, and berries. Oranges, grapes, pomegranate, pineapple, cherries, strawberries, lime, and cranberries are good for the body. They have low sugar content and are also helpful in strengthening our immune system. Eating the whole fruits is a more preferable way in comparison to gulping the fruit juices. Fruits, when eaten whole, have more fibers and less sugar.

Consuming a big bowl of salad is also great for dealing with the obesity problem. A salad that includes fibrous foods such as carrots, radish, lettuce, tomatoes, works better at satiating the hunger pangs without the risk of weight gain.

A high protein diet of eggs, fish, lean meats, etc., is an excellent choice to get rid of obesity. Take enough of omega fatty acids. Remember to drink plenty of water. Keeping yourself hydrated is a smart way to avoid overeating. Water also helps in removing the toxins and excess fat from the body.

As much as possible, avoid fats, sugars, refined flours, and oily foods to keep the weight in control. Control your portion size. Replace the three heavy meals with small and frequent meals during the day. Snacking on sugarless smoothies, dry fruits, etc., is much recommended.

Regular exercise plays an indispensable role in tackling the obesity problem. Whenever possible, walk to the market, take stairs instead of a lift. Physical activity can be in any other form. It could be a favorite hobby like swimming, cycling, lawn tennis, or light jogging.

Meditation and yoga are quite powerful practices to drive away the stress, depression and thus, obesity. But in more serious cases, meeting a physician is the most appropriate strategy. Sometimes, the right medicines and surgical procedures are necessary to control the health condition.

Obesity is spreading like an epidemic, haunting both the adults and the kids. Although genetic factors and other physical ailments play a role, the problem is mostly caused by a reckless lifestyle.

By changing our way of living, we can surely take control of our health. In other words, it would be possible to eliminate the condition of obesity from our lives completely by leading a healthy lifestyle.

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Essays About Obesity: Top 5 Examples and 7 Writing Prompts

Obesity is a pressing health issue many people must deal with in their lives. If you are writing essays about obesity, check out our guide for helpful examples and writing prompts. 

In the world we live in today, certain diseases such as obesity are becoming more significant problems. People suffering from obesity have excess fat, which threatens their health significantly. This can lead to strokes, high blood pressure, heart attacks, and even death. It also dramatically alters one’s physical appearance.

However, we must not be so quick to judge and criticize obese people for their weight and supposed “lifestyle choices.” Not every obese person makes “bad choices” and is automatically “lazy,” as various contributing causes exist. Therefore, we must balance concern for obese people’s health and outright shaming them. 

To write insightful essays about obesity, you can start by reading essay examples. 

5 Best Essay examples

1. obesity as a social issue by earnest washington, 2. is there such a thing as ‘healthy obesity’ by gillian mohney, 3. problems of child obesity by peggy maldonado, 4.  what is fat shaming are you a shamer by jamie long.

• 5. ​​The Dangerous Link Between Coronavirus and Obesity by Rami Bailony

Writing Prompts for Essays About Obesity

1. what causes obesity, 2. what are the effects of obesity, 3. how can you prevent obesity, 4. what is “fat shaming”, 5. why is obesity rate so higher, 6. obesity in the united states, 7. your experience with obesity.

“Weight must be considered as a genuine risk in today’s world. Other than social issues like body shaming, obesity has significantly more to it and is a risk to human life. It must be dealt with and taken care of simply like some other interminable illness and we as people must recollect that machines and innovation has progressed to help us not however not make us unenergetic.”

Washington writes about the dangers of obesity, saying that it can significantly damage your digestive and cardiovascular systems and even cause cancer. In addition, humans’ “expanded reliance on machines” has led us to become less active and more sedentary; as a result, we keep getting fatter. While he acknowledges that shaming obese people does no good, Washington stresses the dangers of being too heavy and encourages people to get fit. 

“‘I think we need to move away from using BMI as categorizing one as obese/overweight or unhealthy,” Zarabi told Healthline. “The real debate here is how do we define health? Is the vegetarian who has a BMI of 30, avoiding all saturated fats from meats and consuming a diet heavy in simple carbohydrates [and thus] reducing his risk of cardiac disease but increasing likelihood of elevated triglycerides and insulin, considered healthy?

Mohney, writing for Healthline, explains how “healthy obesity” is nuanced and should perhaps be retired. Some people may be metabolically healthy and obese simultaneously; however, they are still at risk of diseases associated with obesity. Others believe that health should be determined by more factors than BMI, as some people eat healthily and exercise but remain heavy. People have conflicting opinions on this term, and Mohney describes suggestions to instead focus on getting treatment for “healthy obese” people

“The absence of physical movement is turning into an increasingly normal factor as youngsters are investing more energy inside, and less time outside. Since technology is turning into an immense piece of present-day youngsters’ lives, exercises, for example, watching TV, gaming, messaging and playing on the PC, all of which require next to no vitality and replaces the physical exercises.”

In her essay, Maldonado discusses the causes and effects of childhood obesity. For example, hereditary factors and lack of physical activity make more children overweight; also, high-calorie food and the pressure on kids to “finish their food” make them consume more. 

Obesity leads to high blood pressure and cholesterol, heart disease, and cancer; children should not suffer as they are still so young. 

“Regardless of the catalyst at the root of fat shaming, it persists quite simply because we as a society aren’t doing enough to call it out and stand in solidarity against it. Our culture has largely bought into the farce that thinness equals health and success. Instead, the emphasis needs to shift from the obsession of appearance to promoting healthy lifestyle behaviors for all, regardless of body size. A lean body shouldn’t be a requisite to be treated with dignity and respect. Fat shaming is nonsensical and is the manifestation of ignorance and possibly, hate.”

Long warns readers of the dangers of fat shaming, declaring that it is reprehensible and should not be done. People may have “good intentions” when criticizing overweight or obese people, but it does not, in fact, help with making them healthier. Long believes that society should highlight a healthy lifestyle rather than a “healthy” body, as everyone’s bodies are different and should not be the sole indicator of health. 

5. ​​ The Dangerous Link Between Coronavirus and Obesity by Rami Bailony

“In a study out of NYU, severe obesity (BMI >40) was a greater risk factor for hospitalization among Covid-19 patients than heart failure, smoking status, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease. In China, in a small case series of critically ill Covid-19 patients, 88.24% of patients who died had obesity versus an obesity rate of 18.95% in survivors. In France, patients with a BMI greater than 35 were seven times more likely to require mechanical ventilation than patients with a BMI below 25.”

Bailony’s essay sheds light on research conducted in several countries regarding obesity and COVID-19. The disease is said to be “a leading risk factor in mortality and morbidity” from the virus; studies conducted in the U.S., China, and France show that most obese people who contracted the coronavirus died. Bailony believes obesity is not taken seriously enough and should be treated as an actual disease rather than a mere “lifestyle choice.”

It is well-known that obesity is an excess buildup of body fat, but what exactly causes this? It is not simply due to “eating a lot,” as many people simply understand it; there are other factors besides diet that affect someone’s body size. Look into the different causes of obesity, explaining each and how they are connected.

Obesity can result in the development of many diseases. In addition, it can significantly affect one’s physique and digestive, respiratory, and circulatory systems. For your essay, discuss the different symptoms of obesity and the health complications it can lead to in the future.

It can be safely assumed that no one wants to be obese, as it is detrimental to one’s health. Write an essay guide of some sort, giving tips on managing your weight, staying healthy, and preventing obesity. Include some dietary guidelines, exercise suggestions, and the importance of keeping the balance between these two.

“Fat shaming” is a phenomenon that has become more popular with the rise in obesity rates. Define this term, explain how it is seen in society, and explain why it is terrible. Also, include ways that you can speak about the dangers of obesity without making fun of obese people or making them feel bad for their current state. 

The 21st century has seen a dramatic rise in obesity rates worldwide compared to previous decades. Why is this the case? Explore one or more probable causes for the increase in obese people. You should mention multiple causes in your essay, but you may choose to focus on one only- explain it in detail.

The United States, in particular, is known to be a country with many obese people. This is due to a combination of factors, all connected in some way. Research obesity in the U.S. and write about why it is a bigger problem than in other countries- take a look at portion size, fitness habits, and food production. 

If applicable, you may write about your experience with obesity. Whether you have struggled or are struggling with it in the past or know someone who has, discuss how this makes you feel. Reflect on how this knowledge has impacted you as a person and any lessons this may have taught you. 

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .If you’re looking for more ideas, check out our essays about bullying topic guide !

Obesity Essay

Last updated on: Feb 9, 2023

Obesity Essay: A Complete Guide and Topics

By: Nova A.

11 min read

Reviewed By: Jacklyn H.

Published on: Aug 31, 2021

Are you assigned to write an essay about obesity? The first step is to define obesity.

The obesity epidemic is a major issue facing our country right now. It's complicated- it could be genetic or due to your environment, but either way, there are ways that you can fix it!

Learn all about what causes weight gain and get tips on how you can get healthy again.

On this Page

What is Obesity

What is obesity? Obesity and BMI (body mass index) are both tools of measurement that are used by doctors to assess body fat according to the height, age, and gender of a person. If the BMI is between 25 to 29.9, that means the person has excess weight and body fat.

If the BMI exceeds 30, that means the person is obese. Obesity is a condition that increases the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure, and other medical conditions like metabolic syndrome, arthritis, and even some types of cancer.

Obesity Definition

Obesity is defined by the World Health Organization as an accumulation of abnormal and excess body fat that comes with several risk factors. It is measured by the body mass index BMI, body weight (in kilograms) divided by the square of a person’s height (in meters).

Obesity in America

Obesity is on the verge of becoming an epidemic as 1 in every 3 Americans can be categorized as overweight and obese. Currently, America is an obese country, and it continues to get worse.

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That's our Job!

Causes of obesity

Do you see any obese or overweight people around you?

You likely do.

This is because fast-food chains are becoming more and more common, people are less active, and fruits and vegetables are more expensive than processed foods, thus making them less available to the majority of society. These are the primary causes of obesity.

Obesity is a disease that affects all age groups, including children and elderly people.

Now that you are familiar with the topic of obesity, writing an essay won’t be that difficult for you.

How to Write an Obesity Essay

The format of an obesity essay is similar to writing any other essay. If you need help regarding how to write an obesity essay, it is the same as writing any other essay.

Obesity Essay Introduction

The trick is to start your essay with an interesting and catchy sentence. This will help attract the reader's attention and motivate them to read further. You don’t want to lose the reader’s interest in the beginning and leave a bad impression, especially if the reader is your teacher.

A hook sentence is usually used to open the introductory paragraph of an essay in order to make it interesting. When writing an essay on obesity, the hook sentence can be in the form of an interesting fact or statistic.

Head on to this detailed article on hook examples to get a better idea.

Once you have hooked the reader, the next step is to provide them with relevant background information about the topic. Don’t give away too much at this stage or bombard them with excess information that the reader ends up getting bored with. Only share information that is necessary for the reader to understand your topic.

Next, write a strong thesis statement at the end of your essay, be sure that your thesis identifies the purpose of your essay in a clear and concise manner. Also, keep in mind that the thesis statement should be easy to justify as the body of your essay will revolve around it.

Body Paragraphs

The details related to your topic are to be included in the body paragraphs of your essay. You can use statistics, facts, and figures related to obesity to reinforce your thesis throughout your essay.

If you are writing a cause-and-effect obesity essay, you can mention different causes of obesity and how it can affect a person’s overall health. The number of body paragraphs can increase depending on the parameters of the assignment as set forth by your instructor.

Start each body paragraph with a topic sentence that is the crux of its content. It is necessary to write an engaging topic sentence as it helps grab the reader’s interest. Check out this detailed blog on writing a topic sentence to further understand it.

End your essay with a conclusion by restating your research and tying it to your thesis statement. You can also propose possible solutions to control obesity in your conclusion. Make sure that your conclusion is short yet powerful.

Obesity Essay Examples

Essay about Obesity (PDF)

Childhood Obesity Essay (PDF)

Obesity in America Essay (PDF)

Essay about Obesity Cause and Effects (PDF)

Satire Essay on Obesity (PDF) 

Obesity Argumentative Essay (PDF)

Obesity Essay Topics

Choosing a topic might seem an overwhelming task as you may have many ideas for your assignment. Brainstorm different ideas and narrow them down to one, quality topic.

If you need some examples to help you with your essay topic related to obesity, dive into this article and choose from the list of obesity essay topics.

Childhood Obesity

As mentioned earlier, obesity can affect any age group, including children. Obesity can cause several future health problems as children age.

Here are a few topics you can choose from and discuss for your childhood obesity essay:

• What are the causes of increasing obesity in children?
• Obese parents may be at risk for having children with obesity.
• What is the ratio of obesity between adults and children?
• What are the possible treatments for obese children?
• Are there any social programs that can help children with combating obesity?
• Has technology boosted the rate of obesity in children?
• Are children spending more time on gadgets instead of playing outside?
• Schools should encourage regular exercises and sports for children.
• How can sports and other physical activities protect children from becoming obese?
• Can childhood abuse be a cause of obesity among children?
• What is the relationship between neglect in childhood and obesity in adulthood?
• Does obesity have any effect on the psychological condition and well-being of a child?
• Are electronic medical records effective in diagnosing obesity among children?
• Obesity can affect the academic performance of your child.
• Do you believe that children who are raised by a single parent can be vulnerable to obesity?
• You can promote interesting exercises to encourage children.
• What is the main cause of obesity, and why is it increasing with every passing day?
• Schools and colleges should work harder to develop methodologies to decrease childhood obesity.
• The government should not allow schools and colleges to include sweet or fatty snacks as a part of their lunch.
• If a mother is obese, can it affect the health of the child?
• Children who gain weight frequently can develop chronic diseases.

Obesity Argumentative Essay Topics

Do you want to write an argumentative essay on the topic of obesity?

The following list can help you with that!

Here are some examples you can choose from for your argumentative essay about obesity:

• Can vegetables and fruits decrease the chances of obesity?
• Should you go for surgery to overcome obesity?
• Are there any harmful side effects?
• Can obesity be related to the mental condition of an individual?
• Are parents responsible for controlling obesity in childhood?
• What are the most effective measures to prevent the increase in the obesity rate?
• Why is the obesity rate increasing in the United States?
• Can the lifestyle of a person be a cause of obesity?
• Does the economic situation of a country affect the obesity rate?
• How is obesity considered an international health issue?
• Can technology and gadgets affect obesity rates?
• What can be the possible reasons for obesity in a school?
• How can we address the issue of obesity?
• Is obesity a chronic disease?
• Is obesity a major cause of heart attacks?
• Are the junk food chains causing an increase in obesity?
• Do nutritional programs help in reducing the obesity rate?
• How can the right type of diet help with obesity?
• Why should we encourage sports activities in schools and colleges?
• Can obesity affect a person’s behavior?

Health Related Topics for Research Paper

If you are writing a research paper, you can explain the cause and effect of obesity.

Here are a few topics that link to the cause and effects of obesity.Review the literature of previous articles related to obesity. Describe the ideas presented in the previous papers.

• Can family history cause obesity in future generations?
• Can we predict obesity through genetic testing?
• What is the cause of the increasing obesity rate?
• Do you think the increase in fast-food restaurants is a cause of the rising obesity rate?
• Is the ratio of obese women greater than obese men?
• Why are women more prone to be obese as compared to men?
• Stress can be a cause of obesity. Mention the reasons how mental health can be related to physical health.
• Is urban life a cause of the increasing obesity rate?
• People from cities are prone to be obese as compared to people from the countryside.
• How obesity affects the life expectancy of people? What are possible solutions to decrease the obesity rate?
• Do family eating habits affect or trigger obesity?
• How do eating habits affect the health of an individual?
• How can obesity affect the future of a child?
• Obese children are more prone to get bullied in high school and college.
• Why should schools encourage more sports and exercise for children?

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Topics for Essay on Obesity as a Problem

Do you think a rise in obesity rate can affect the economy of a country?

Here are some topics for your assistance regarding your economics related obesity essay.

• Does socioeconomic status affect the possibility of obesity in an individual?
• Analyze the film and write a review on “Fed Up” – an obesity epidemic.
• Share your reviews on the movie “The Weight of The Nation.”
• Should we increase the prices of fast food and decrease the prices of fruits and vegetables to decrease obesity?
• Do you think healthy food prices can be a cause of obesity?
• Describe what measures other countries have taken in order to control obesity?
• The government should play an important role in controlling obesity. What precautions should they take?
• Do you think obesity can be one of the reasons children get bullied?
• Do obese people experience any sort of discrimination or inappropriate behavior due to their weight?
• Are there any legal protections for people who suffer from discrimination due to their weight?
• Which communities have a higher percentage of obesity in the United States?
• Discuss the side effects of the fast-food industry and their advertisements on children.
• Describe how the increasing obesity rate has affected the economic condition of the United States.
• What is the current percentage of obesity all over the world? Is the obesity rate increasing with every passing day?
• Why is the obesity rate higher in the United States as compared to other countries?
• Do Asians have a greater percentage of obese people as compared to Europe?
• Does the cultural difference affect the eating habits of an individual?
• Obesity and body shaming.
• Why is a skinny body considered to be ideal? Is it an effective way to reduce the obesity rate?

Obesity Solution Essay Topics

With all the developments in medicine and technology, we still don’t have exact measures to treat obesity.

Here are some insights you can discuss in your essay:

• How do obese people suffer from metabolic complications?
• Describe the fat distribution in obese people.
• Is type 2 diabetes related to obesity?
• Are obese people more prone to suffer from diabetes in the future?
• How are cardiac diseases related to obesity?
• Can obesity affect a woman’s childbearing time phase?
• Describe the digestive diseases related to obesity.
• Obesity may be genetic.
• Obesity can cause a higher risk of suffering a heart attack.
• What are the causes of obesity? What health problems can be caused if an individual suffers from obesity?
• What are the side effects of surgery to overcome obesity?
• Which drugs are effective when it comes to the treatment of obesity?
• Is there a difference between being obese and overweight?
• Can obesity affect the sociological perspective of an individual?
• Explain how an obesity treatment works.
• How can the government help people to lose weight and improve public health?

Writing an essay is a challenging yet rewarding task. All you need is to be organized and clear when it comes to academic writing.

• Choose a topic you would like to write on.
• Organize your thoughts.
• Pen down your ideas.
• Compose a perfect essay that will help you ace your subject.
• Proofread and revise your paper.

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As a Digital Content Strategist, Nova Allison has eight years of experience in writing both technical and scientific content. With a focus on developing online content plans that engage audiences, Nova strives to write pieces that are not only informative but captivating as well.

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Prevention, prevention, prevention.

Losing weight is hard to do.

In the U.S., only one in six adults who have dropped excess pounds actually keep off at least 10 percent of their original body weight. The reason: a mismatch between biology and environment. Our bodies are evolutionarily programmed to put on fat to ride out famine and preserve the excess by slowing metabolism and, more important, provoking hunger. People who have slimmed down and then regain their weight don’t lack willpower—their bodies are fighting them every inch of the way.

This inborn predisposition to hold on to added weight reverberates down the life course. Few children are born obese, but once they become heavy, they are usually destined to be heavy adolescents and heavy adults. According to a 2016 study in the New England Journal of Medicine , approximately 90 percent of children with severe obesity will become obese adults with a BMI of 35 or higher. Heavy young adults are generally heavy in middle and old age. Obesity also jumps across generations; having a mother who is obese is one of the strongest predictors of obesity in children.

All of which means that preventing child obesity is key to stopping the epidemic. By the time weight piles up in adulthood, it is usually too late. Luckily, preventing obesity in children is easier than in adults, partly because the excess calories they absorb are minimal and can be adjusted by small changes in diet—substituting water, for example, for sugary fruit juices or soda.

Still, the bulk of the obesity problem—literally—is in adults. According to Frank Hu, chair of the Harvard Chan Department of Nutrition, “Most people gain weight during young and middle adulthood. The weight-gain trajectory is less than 1 pound per year, but it creeps up steadily from age 18 to age 55. During this time, people gain fat mass, not muscle mass. When they reach age 55 or so, they begin to lose their existing muscle mass and gain even more fat mass. That’s when all the metabolic problems appear: insulin resistance, high cholesterol, high blood pressure.”

Adds Walter Willett, Frederick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard Chan, “The first 5 pounds of weight gain at age 25—that’s the time to be taking action. Because someone is on a trajectory to end up being 30 pounds overweight by the time they’re age 50.”

The most realistic near-term public health goal, therefore, is not to reverse but rather to slow down the trend—and even this will require strong commitment from government at many levels. In May 2017, the Trump administration rolled back recently-enacted standards for school meals, delaying a rule to lower sodium and allowing waivers for regulations requiring cafeterias to serve foods rich in whole grains. If recent expansions in food entitlements and school meals are undermined, “It would be a ‘disaster,’ to use the president’s word,” says Marlene Schwartz, director of the Rudd Center for Obesity & Food Policy at the University of Connecticut. “The federal food programs are incredibly important, not just because of the food and money they provide families, but because supporting better nutrition in child care, schools, and the WIC [Women, Infants, and Children] program has created new social norms. We absolutely cannot undo the progress that we’ve made in helping this generation transition to a healthier diet.”

Get the science right.

It is impossible to prescribe solutions to obesity without reminding ourselves that nutrition scientists botched things decades ago and probably sent the epidemic into overdrive. Beginning in the 1970s, the U.S. government and major professional groups recommended for the first time that people eat a low-fat/high-carbohydrate diet. The advice was codified in 1977 with the first edition of The Dietary Goals for the United States , which aimed to cut diet-related conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. What ensued amounted to arguably the biggest public health experiment in U.S. history, and it backfired.

At the time, saturated fat and dietary cholesterol were believed to be the main factors responsible for cardiovascular disease—an oversimplified theory that ignored the fact that not all fats are created equal. Soon, the public health blitz against saturated fat became a war on all fat. In the American diet, fat calories plummeted and carb calories shot up.

“We can’t blame industry for this. It was a bandwagon effect in the scientific community, despite the lack of evidence—even with evidence to the contrary,” says Willett. “Farmers have known for thousands of years that if you put animals in a pen, don’t let them run around, and load them up with grains, they get fat. That’s basically what has been happening to people: We created the great American feedlot. And we added in sugar, coloring, and seductive promotion for low-fat junk food.”

Scientists now know that whole fruits and vegetables (other than potatoes), whole grains, high-quality proteins (such as from fish, chicken, beans, and nuts), and healthy plant oils (such as olive, peanut, or canola oil) are the foundations of a healthy diet.

But there is also a lot scientists don’t yet know. One unanswered question is why some people with obesity are spared the medical complications of excess weight. Another concerns the major mechanisms by which obesity ushers in disease. Although surplus body weight can itself directly cause problems—such as arthritis due to added load on joints, or breast cancer caused by hormones secreted by fat cells—in general, obesity triggers myriad biological processes. Many of the resulting conditions—such as atherosclerosis, diabetes, and even Alzheimer’s disease—are mediated by inflammation, in which the body’s immune response becomes damagingly self-perpetuating. In this sense, today’s food system is as inflammagenic as it is obesigenic.

Scientists also need to ferret out the nuanced effects of particular foods. For example, do fermented products—such as yogurt, tempeh, or sauerkraut—have beneficial properties? Some studies have found that yogurt protects against weight gain and diabetes, and suggest that healthy live bacteria (known as probiotics) may play a role. Other reports point to fruits being more protective than vegetables in weight control and diabetes prevention, although the types of fruits and vegetables make a difference.

A 2017 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that substituting whole grains for refined grains led to a loss of nearly 100 calories a day—by speeding up metabolism, cutting the number of calories that the body hangs on to, and, more surprisingly, by changing the digestibility of other foods on the plate. That extra energy lost daily—by substituting, say, brown rice for white rice or barley for pita bread—was equivalent to a brisk 30-minute walk. One hundred calories a day, sustained over years, and multiplied by the population is one mathematical equivalent of the obesity epidemic.

A companion study found that adults who ate a whole-grain-rich diet developed healthier gut bacteria and improved immune responses. That particular foods alter the gut microbiome—the dense and vital community of bacteria and other microorganisms that work symbiotically with the body’s own digestive system—is another critical insight. The microbiome helps determine weight by controlling how our bodies extract calories and store fat in the liver, and the microbiomes of obese individuals are startlingly efficient at harvesting calories from food. [To learn more about Harvard Chan research on the gut microbiome, read “ Bugs in the System .”] The hormonal effects of sleep deprivation and stress—two epidemics concurrent and intertwined with the obesity trend—are other promising avenues of research.

And then there are the mystery factors. One recent hypothesis is that an agent known as adenovirus 36 partly accounts for our collective heft. A 2010 article in The Royal Society described a study in which researchers examined samples of more than 20,000 animals from eight species living with or around humans in industrialized nations, a menagerie that included macaques, chimpanzees, vervets, marmosets, lab mice and rats, feral rats, and domestic dogs and cats. Like their Homo sapiens counterparts, all of the study populations had gained weight over the past several decades—wild, domestic, and lab animals alike. The chance that this is a coincidence is, according to the scientists’ estimate, 1 in 10 million. The stumped authors surmise that viruses, gene expression changes, or “as-of-yet unidentified and/or poorly understood factors” are to blame.

Master the art of persuasion.

A 2015 paper in the American Journal of Public Health revealed the philosophical chasm that hampers America’s progress on obesity prevention. It found that 72 to 98 percent of obesity-related media reports emphasize personal responsibility for weight, compared with 40 percent of scientific papers.

A recent study by Drexel University researchers also quantified the political polarization around public health measures. From 1998 through 2013, Democrats voted in line with recommendations from the American Public Health Association 88.3 percent of the time, on average, while Republicans voted for the proposals just 21.3 percent of the time.

Clearly, we can’t count on bipartisan goodwill to stem the obesity crisis. But we can ask what kinds of messages appeal to politically divergent audiences. A stealth strategy may be to avoid even uttering the word “obesity.” On January 1 of this year, Philadelphia’s 1.5-cents-per-ounce excise tax on sugar-sweetened and diet beverages took effect. When Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney lobbied voters to approve the tax, his bid centered not on improving health—the unsuccessful pitch of his predecessor—but on raising $91 million annually for prekindergarten programs.

“That’s something lots of people care about and can get behind—it’s a feel-good policy, and it makes sense,” says psychologist Christina Roberto, assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and a former assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences and nutrition at Harvard Chan. The provision for taxing diet beverages was also shrewd, she adds, because it spread the tax’s pain; since wealthier people are more likely than less-affluent individuals to buy diet drinks, the tax could not be slapped with the label “regressive.”

But Roberto sees a larger lesson in the Philadelphia story. Public health messaging that appeals to values that transcend the individual is less fraught, less stigmatizing, and perhaps more effective. As she puts it, “It’s very different to hear the message, ‘Eat less red meat, help the planet’ versus ‘Eat less red meat, help yourself avoid saturated fat and cardiovascular disease.’”

Supermarket makeovers

Supermarket aisles are other places where public health can shuffle a deck stacked against healthy consumer choices.

With slim profit margins and 50,000-plus products on their shelves, grocery stores depend heavily on food manufacturers’ promotional incentives to make their bottom lines. “Manufacturers pay slotting fees to get their products on the shelf, and they pay promotion allowances: We’ll give you this much off a carton of Coke if you put it on sale for a certain price or if you put it on an end-of-aisle display,” says José Alvarez, former president and chief executive officer of Stop & Shop/Giant-Landover, now senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School. Such promotional payments, Alvarez adds, often exceed retailers’ net profits.

Healthy new products—like flash-frozen dinners prepared with heaps of vegetables and whole grains, and relatively little salt—can’t compete for prized shelf space against boxed mac and cheese or cloying breakfast cereals. One solution, says Alvarez, is for established consumer packaged goods companies to buy out what he calls the “hippie in the basement” firms that have whipped up more nutritious items. The behemoths could apply their production, marketing, and distribution prowess to the new offerings—and indeed, this has started to happen over the last five years.

Another approach is to make nutritious foods more convenient to eat. “We have all of these cooking shows and upscale food magazines, but most people don’t have the time or inclination—or the skills, quite frankly—to cook,” says Alvarez. “Instead, we should focus on creating high-quality, healthy, affordable prepared foods.”

An additional model is suggested by Jeff Dunn, a 20-year veteran of the soft drink industry and former president of Coca-Cola North America, who went on to become an advocate for fresh, healthy food. Dunn served as president and chief executive officer of Bolthouse Farms from 2008 to 2015, where he dramatically increased sales of baby carrots by using marketing techniques common in the junk food business. “We operated on the principles of the three 3 A’s: accessibility, availability, and affordability,” says Dunn. “That, by the way, is Coke’s more-than-70-year-old formula for success.”

Show them the money.

Obesity kills budgets. According to the Campaign to End Obesity, a collaboration of leaders from industry, academia, public health, and policymakers, annual U.S. health costs related to obesity approach $200 billion. In 2010, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that nearly 20 percent of the rise in health care spending from 1987 to 2007 was linked to obesity. And the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that full-time workers in the U.S. who are overweight or obese and have other chronic health conditions miss an estimated 450 million more days of work each year than do healthy employees—upward of $153 billion in lost productivity annually.

But making the money case for obesity prevention isn’t straightforward. For interventions targeting children and youth, only a small fraction of savings is captured in the first decade, since most serious health complications don’t emerge for many years. Long-term obesity prevention, in other words, doesn’t fit into political timetables for elected officials.

Yet lawmakers are keen to know how “best for the money” obesity-prevention programs can help them in the short run. Over the past two years, Harvard Chan’s Steve Gortmaker and his colleagues have been working with state health departments in Alaska, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Washington, and West Virginia and with the city of Philadelphia and other locales, building cost-effectiveness models using local data for a wide variety of interventions—from improved early child care to healthy school environments to communitywide campaigns. “We collaborate with health departments and community stakeholders, provide them with the evidence base, help assess how much different options cost, model the results over a decade, and they pick what they want to work on. One constant that we’ve seen—and these are very different political environments—is a strong interest in cost-effectiveness,” he says.

In a 2015 study in Health Affairs , Gortmaker and colleagues outlined three interventions that would more than pay for themselves: an excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages implemented at the state level; elimination of the tax subsidy for advertising unhealthy food to children; and strong nutrition standards for food and drinks sold in schools outside of school meals. Implemented nationally, these interventions would prevent 576,000, 129,100, and 345,000 cases of childhood obesity, respectively, by 2025. The projected net savings to society in obesity-related health care costs for each dollar invested: $31, $33, and $4.60, respectively.

Gortmaker is one of the leaders of a collaborative modeling effort known as CHOICES—for Childhood Obesity Intervention Cost-Effectiveness Study—an acronym that seems a pointed rebuttal to the reflexive conservative argument that government regulation tramples individual choice. Having grown up not far from Des Plaines, Illinois, site of the first McDonald’s franchise in the country, he emphasizes to policymakers that at this late date, America cannot treat its way out of obesity, given current medical know-how. Only a thoroughgoing investment in prevention will turn the tide. “Clinical interventions produce too small an effect, with too small a population, and at high cost,” Gortmaker says. “The good news is that there are many cost-effective options to choose from.”

While Gortmaker underscores the importance of improving both food choices and options for physical activity, he has shown that upgrading the food environment offers much more benefit for the buck. This is in line with the gathering scientific consensus that what we eat plays a greater role in obesity than does sedentary lifestyle (although exercise protects against many of the metabolic consequences of excess weight). “The easiest way to explain it,” Gortmaker says, “is to talk about a sugary beverage—140 calories. You could quickly change a kid’s risk of excess energy balance by 140 calories a day just by switching from a sugary drink a day to water or sparkling water. But for a 10-year-old boy to burn an extra 140 calories, he’d have to replace an hour-and-a-half of sitting with an hour-and-a-half of walking.”

Small tweaks in adults’ diets can likewise make a big difference in short order. “With adults, health care costs rise rapidly with excess weight gain,” Gortmaker says. “If you can slow the onset of obesity, you slow the onset of diabetes, and potentially not only save health care costs but also boost people’s productivity in the workforce.”

One of Gortmaker’s most intriguing calculations spins off of the food industry’s estimated $633 million spent on television marketing aimed at kids. Currently, federal tax treatment of advertising as an ordinary business expense means that the government, in effect, subsidizes hawking of junk food to children. Gortmaker modeled a national intervention that would eliminate this subsidy of TV ads for nutritionally empty foods and beverages aimed at 2- to 19-year-olds. Drawing on well-delineated relationships between exposure to these advertisements and subsequent weight gain, he found that the intervention would save $260 million in downstream health care costs. Although the effect would probably be small at the individual level, it would be significant at the population level.

Level the playing field through taxes and regulation.

When public health took on cigarette smoking, starting in the 1960s, it did so with robust policies banning television ads and other marketing, raising taxes to increase prices, making public places smoke-free, and offering people treatment such as the nicotine patch. In 1965, the smoking rate for U.S. adults was 42.2 percent; today, it is 16.8 percent.

Similarly, America reduced the rate of deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents—a 90 percent decrease over the 20th century, according to the CDC—with mandatory seat belt laws, safer car designs, stop signs, speed limits, rumble strips, and the stigmatization of drunk driving.

Change the product. Change the environment. Change the culture. That is also the policy recipe for stopping obesity.

Laws that make healthy behaviors easier are often followed by positive changes in those behaviors. And people who are trying to adopt healthy behaviors tend to support policies that make their personal aspirations achievable, which in turn nudges lawmakers to back the proposals.

One debate today revolves around whether recipients of federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (formerly known as food stamps) should be restricted from buying sodas or junk food. The largest component of the USDA budget, SNAP feeds one in seven Americans. A USDA report, issued last November, found that the number-one purchase by SNAP households was sweetened beverages, a category that included soft drinks, fruit juices, energy drinks, and sweetened teas, accounting for nearly 10 percent of SNAP money spent on food. Is the USDA therefore underwriting the soda industry and planting the seeds for chronic disease that the government will pay to treat years down the line?

Eric Rimm, a professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Nutrition at the Harvard Chan School, frames the issue differently. In a 2017 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine , he and his colleagues asked SNAP participants whether they would prefer the standard benefits package or a “SNAP-plus” that prohibited the purchase of sugary beverages but offered 50 percent more money for buying fruits and vegetables. Sixty-eight percent of the participants chose the healthy SNAP-plus option.

“A lot of work around SNAP policy is done by academics and politicians, without reaching out to the beneficiaries,” says Rimm. “We haven’t asked participants, ‘What’s your say in this? How can we make this program better for you?’” To be sure, SNAP is riddled with nutritional contradictions. Under current rules, for example, participants can use benefits to buy a 12-pack of Pepsi or a Snickers bar or a giant bag of Lay’s potato chips but not real food that happens to be heated, such as a package of rotisserie chicken. “This is the most vulnerable population in the country,” says Rimm. “We’re not listening well enough to our constituency.”

Other innovative fiscal levers to alter behavior could also drive down obesity. In 2014, a trio of strong voices on food industry practices—Dariush Mozaffarian, DrPH ’06, dean of Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and former associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School; Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics at Harvard; and David Ludwig, professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard Chan and a physician at Boston Children’s Hospital—broached the idea of a “meaningful” tax on nearly all packaged retail foods and many chain restaurants, with the proceeds used to pay for minimally processed foods and healthier meals for school kids. In essence, the tax externalizes the social costs of harmful individual behavior.

“We made a straightforward proposal to tax all processed foods and then use the income to subsidize whole foods in a short-term, revenue-neutral way,” explains Ludwig. “The power of this idea is that, since there is so much processed food consumption, even a modest tax—in the 10 to 15 percent range—is not going to greatly inflate the cost of these foods. Their price would increase moderately, but the proceeds would not disappear into government coffers. Instead, the revenue would make healthy foods affordable for virtually the entire population, and the benefits would be immediately evident. Yes, people will pay moderately more for their Coke or for their cinnamon bear claw but a lot less for nourishing, whole foods.”

Another suggestion comes from Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, and Abdulrahman M. El-Sayed, a public health physician and epidemiologist. In a 2015 issue of the American Journal of Public Health , they called for “calorie offsets,” similar to the carbon offsets used to mitigate environmental harm caused by the gas and oil industries. A “calorie offset” scheme could hand the food and beverage industries a chance at redemption by inviting them to invest in such undertakings as city farms, cooking classes for parents, healthy school cafeterias, and urban green spaces.

These ambitious proposals face almost impossibly high hurdles. Political battle lines typically pit public health against corporations, with Big Food casting doubt on solid nutrition science, deeming government regulation a threat to free choice, and making self-policing pledges that it has never kept. On the website for the Americans for Food and Beverage Choice, a group spearheaded by the American Beverage Association, is the admonition: “[W]hether it’s at a restaurant or in a grocery store, it’s never the government’s job to decide what you choose to eat and drink.”

Yet surprisingly, many public health professionals are convinced that the only way to stop obesity is to make common cause with the food industry. “This isn’t like tobacco, where it’s a fight to the death. We need the food industry to make healthier food and to make a profit,” says Mozaffarian. “The food industry is much more diverse and heterogeneous than tobacco or even cars. As long as we can help them—through carrots and sticks, tax incentives and disincentives—to move towards healthier products, then they are part of the solution. But we have to be vigilant, because they use a lot of the same tactics that tobacco did.”

Sow what we want to reap.

Americans overeat what our farmers overproduce.

“The U.S. food system is egregiously terrible for human and planetary health,” says Walter Willett. It’s so terrible, Willett made a pie chart of American grain production consumed domestically. It shows that most of the country’s agricultural land goes to the two giant commodity crops: corn and soy. Most of those crops, in turn, go to animal fodder and ethanol, and are also heavily used in processed snack foods. Today, only about 10 percent of grain grown in the U.S. for domestic use is eaten directly by human beings. According to a 2013 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, only 2 percent of U.S. farmland is used to grow fruits and vegetables, while 59 percent is devoted to commodity crops.

Historically, those skewed proportions made sense. Federal food policies, drafted with the goal of alleviating hunger, preferentially subsidize corn and soy production. And whereas corn or soybeans could be shipped for days on a train, fruits and vegetables had to be grown closer to cities by truck farmers so the produce wouldn’t spoil. But those long-ago constraints don’t explain today’s upside-down agricultural priorities.

In a now-classic 2016 Politico article titled “The farm bill drove me insane,” Marion Nestle illustrated the irrational gap between what the government recommends we eat and what it subsidizes: “If you were to create a MyPlate meal that matched where the government historically aimed its subsidies, you’d get a lecture from your doctor. More than three-quarters of your plate would be taken up by a massive corn fritter (80 percent of benefits go to corn, grains and soy oil). You’d have a Dixie cup of milk (dairy gets 3 percent), a hamburger the size of a half dollar (livestock: 2 percent), two peas (fruits and vegetables: 0.45 percent) and an after-dinner cigarette (tobacco: 2 percent). Oh, and a really big linen napkin (cotton: 13 percent) to dab your lips.”

In this sense, the USDA marginalizes human health. Many of the foods that nutritionists agree are best for us—notably, fruits, vegetables, and tree nuts—fall under the bureaucratic rubric “specialty crops,” a category that also includes “dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops (including floriculture).” Farm bills, which get passed every five years or so, fortify the status quo. The 2014 Farm Bill, for example, provided $73 million for the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program in 2017, out of a total of about $25 billion for the USDA’s discretionary budget. (The next Farm Bill, now under debate, will be coming out in 2018.)

By contrast, a truly anti-obesigenic agricultural system would stimulate USDA support for crop diversity—through technical assistance, research, agricultural training programs, and financial aid for farmers who are newly planting or transitioning their land into produce. It would also enable farmers, most of whom survive on razor-thin profit margins, to make a decent living.

In the early 1970s, Finland’s death rate from coronary heart disease was the highest in the world, and in the eastern region of North Karelia—a pristine, sparsely populated frontier landscape of forest and lakes—the rate was 40 percent worse than the national average. Every family saw physically active men, loggers and farmers who were strong and lean, dying in their prime.

Thus was born the North Karelia Project, which became a model worldwide for saving lives by transforming lifestyles. The project was launched in 1972 and officially ended 25 years later. While its initial goal was to reduce smoking and saturated fat in the diet, it later resolved to increase fruit and vegetable consumption.

The North Karelia Project fulfilled all of these ambitions. When it started, for example, 86 percent of men and 82 percent of women smeared butter on their bread; by the early 2000s, only 10 percent of men and 4 percent of women so indulged. Use of vegetable oil for cooking jumped from virtually zero in 1970 to 50 percent in 2009. Fruit and vegetables, once rare visitors to the dinner plate, became regulars. Over the project’s official quarter-century existence, coronary heart disease deaths in working-age North Karelian men fell 82 percent, and life expectancy rose seven years.

The secret of North Karelia’s success was an all-out philosophy. Team members spent innumerable hours meeting with residents and assuring them that they had the power to improve their own health. The volunteers enlisted the assistance of an influential women’s group, farmers’ unions, homemakers’ organizations, hunting clubs, and church congregations. They redesigned food labels and upgraded health services. Towns competed in cholesterol-cutting contests. The national government passed sweeping legislation (including a total ban on tobacco advertising). Dairy subsidies were thrown out. Farmers were given strong incentives to produce low-fat milk, or to get paid for meat and dairy products based not on high-fat but on high-protein content. And the newly established East Finland Berry and Vegetable Project helped locals switch from dairy farming—which had made up more than two-thirds of agriculture in the region—to cultivation of cold-hardy currants, gooseberries, and strawberries, as well as rapeseed for heart-healthy canola oil.

“A mass epidemic calls for mass action,” says the project’s director, Pekka Puska, “and the changing of lifestyles can only succeed through community action. In this case, the people pulled the government—the government didn’t pull the people.”

Could the United States in 2017 learn from North Karelia’s 1970s grand experiment?

“Americans didn’t become an obese nation overnight. It took a long time—several decades, the same timeline as in individuals,” notes Frank Hu. “What were we doing over the past 20 years or 30 years, before we crossed this threshold? We haven’t asked these questions. We haven’t done this kind of soul-searching, as individuals or society as a whole.”

Today, Americans may finally be willing to take a hard look at how food figures in their lives. In a July 2015 Gallup phone poll of Americans 18 and older, 61 percent said they actively try to avoid regular soda (the figure was 41 percent in 2002); 50 percent try to avoid sugar; and 93 percent try to eat vegetables (but only 57.7 percent in 2013 reported they ate five or more servings of fruits and vegetables at least four days of the previous week).

Individual resolve, of course, counts for little in problems as big as the obesity epidemic. Most successes in public health bank on collective action to support personal responsibility while fighting discrimination against an epidemic’s victims. [To learn more about the perils of stigma against people with obesity, read “ The Scarlet F .”]

Yet many of public health’s legendary successes also took what seems like an agonizingly long time to work. Do we have that luxury?

“Right now, healthy eating in America is like swimming upstream. If you are a strong swimmer and in good shape, you can swim for a little while, but eventually you’re going to get tired and start floating back down,” says Margo Wootan, SD ’93, director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “If you’re distracted for a second—your kid tugs on your pant leg, you had a bad day, you’re tired, you’re worried about paying your bills—the default options push you toward eating too much of the wrong kinds of food.”

But Wootan has not lowered her sights. “What we need is mobilization,” she says. “Mobilize the public to address nutrition and obesity as societal problems—recognizing that each of us makes individual choices throughout the day, but that right now the environment is stacked against us. If we don’t change that, stopping obesity will be impossible.”

The passing of power to younger generations may aid the cause. Millennials are more inclined to view food not merely as nutrition but also as narrative—a trend that leaves Duke University’s Kelly Brownell optimistic. “Younger people have been raised to care about the story of their food. Their interest is in where it came from, who grew it, whether it contributes to sustainable agriculture, its carbon footprint, and other factors. The previous generation paid attention to narrower issues, such as hunger or obesity. The Millennials are attuned to the concept of food systems.”

We are at a public health inflection point. Forty years from now, when we gaze at the high-resolution digital color photos from our own era, what will we think? Will we realize that we failed to address the obesity epidemic, or will we know that we acted wisely?

The question brings us back to the 1970s, and to Pekka Puska, the physician who directed the North Karelia Project during its quarter-century existence. Puska, now 71, was all of 27 and burning with big ideas when he signed up to lead the audacious effort. He knows the promise and the perils of idealism. “Changing the world may have been utopic,” he says, “but changing public health was possible.”

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Essay on Obesity

Students are often asked to write an essay on Obesity in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Obesity

Understanding obesity.

Obesity is a health condition where a person has excess body fat. It’s often measured using the Body Mass Index (BMI).

Causes of Obesity

Obesity can be caused by eating too much and not exercising enough. Also, genetics and lifestyle can play a role.

Effects of Obesity

Obesity can lead to serious health problems like heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer.

Preventing Obesity

Eating a balanced diet and regular physical activity can help prevent obesity. It’s important to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

250 Words Essay on Obesity

Introduction.

Obesity represents a significant public health issue worldwide, posing detrimental effects to physical health and psychological well-being. It is a complex disorder involving an excessive amount of body fat, often resulting from a combination of genetic, behavioral, and environmental factors.

The primary cause of obesity is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and expended. This disparity is often fueled by unhealthy diets rich in fats and sugars, and a sedentary lifestyle. Genetics also play a critical role, affecting how the body metabolizes food and stores fat.

Implications on Health

Obesity significantly increases the risk of various diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. Additionally, it can lead to mental health issues like depression and lower quality of life.

Prevention and Management

Preventing obesity requires a multi-faceted approach. It entails adopting a healthier diet, increasing physical activity, and creating supportive environments that promote healthy choices. Management of obesity often involves similar strategies, though in some cases, medication or surgery may be necessary.

In conclusion, obesity is a pressing global health concern that requires immediate attention. It is crucial to promote healthier lifestyles and create supportive environments to combat this epidemic. The battle against obesity is not only about individual responsibility but also about societal commitment to fostering healthful living.

500 Words Essay on Obesity

Obesity, a complex and multifaceted health issue, has become a global epidemic. Characterized by excessive body fat, it poses a significant risk to an individual’s health, leading to numerous chronic illnesses. This essay will delve into the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to this growing health crisis.

The primary cause of obesity is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and expended. This is often due to a combination of excessive dietary intake, lack of physical activity, and genetic susceptibility. However, it is important to recognize the role of socio-economic factors. The availability of high-calorie, low-nutrient food, urbanization, and sedentary lifestyles have all contributed to the rise in obesity rates.

Health Consequences

Obesity significantly increases the risk of various health problems. It is a major risk factor for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, musculoskeletal disorders, and some cancers. Moreover, obesity can lead to psychological issues, including depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem.

Socioeconomic Impact

The socioeconomic impact of obesity is profound. It places a heavy burden on healthcare systems due to the high cost of treating obesity-related diseases. Furthermore, obesity can lead to reduced productivity and increased absenteeism in the workforce, affecting economic growth.

Prevention and Control

In conclusion, obesity is a complex issue with far-reaching consequences. It is driven by a combination of individual, environmental, and socio-economic factors. Therefore, addressing this problem requires concerted efforts at multiple levels. By implementing comprehensive strategies that promote healthy lifestyles and create supportive environments, we can combat the obesity epidemic and improve public health.

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90+ Obesity Essay Topics

Obesity is one of the most widespread diseases. Today it’s easy to meet an obese or overweight person. Look around – it’s your neighbor, classmate, or colleague. If you are lucky enough, and all of the people close to you are thin and slender, the problem still exists. Even the growing popularity of healthy eating and being fit cannot significantly decrease obesity rates. While fat people may often be considered as soft and cheerful persons, their weight badly influences their overall health. This disease affects all age groups: children, adolescents, adults, and elderly.

In this article our essay writers want to show you a list of topics connected with obesity that you can freely use for your own essay. You can paraphrase them or use them as they are, unchanged. We strive to cover the most interesting and recent topics about obesity and being overweight. Enjoy!

Childhood obesity research topics

Obesity can dramatically influence the physical and social well-being of children. Usually, overweight children grow up to be adults with health problems. Let’s see what topics you can discuss in relation to childhood and adolescent obesity.

• Explain how parents with obesity increase the chances of their children to be obese.
• What are the main reasons for child obesity in well-developed/developing countries?
• Explore the local statistics of obesity rates among adults and children in your state. What treatment and social programs are available?
• Do TV, computers, and other gadgets influence childhood obesity rates?
• How fast food advertising influences childhood obesity .
• How do regular exercises and sports in childhood protect from obesity in adulthood?
• Explain the effect of childhood abuse and neglect in relation to obesity in adulthood.
• How does obesity affect the psychological well-being and emotions of a child?
• How do childhood and adult obesity influence your community and you personally?
• Evaluate the effectiveness of isocaloric fructose restrictions for children with obesity.
• Do electronic medical records improve the diagnostics and screening of children with obesity?
• Think about whether childhood obesity influences the level of academic performance of a child.
• Is it true that children raised within a single-parent family are more prone to obesity?
• How can exercises among children and adolescents be promoted? How can they be made interesting and engaging?
• Explain the main causes of obesity among pre-adolescents in the US.
• Explain the causes of the increasing prevalence of adolescent obesity in Hong Kong (or another country of your choice).
• What measures can schools and universities use to decrease obesity rates?
• Persuade your audience that one of the most effective ways to decrease the obesity of students in schools is removing sweets and high-fat snacks from vending machines.
• Examine physical education programs in schools and colleges. How is it connected to obesity?
• How does the obesity of a mother affect a newborn?
• Analyze how childhood obesity influences the early development of chronic diseases.

Obesity argumentative essay topics

Obesity is a quite controversial issue. Doctors and researchers actively seek for the real causes of obesity and find working methods to fight the disease. Also, scientists still argue whether obesity is a disease or not.

• Does a vegetarian diet decrease chances of obesity? Why?
• Can surgery methods overcome obesity? Is it the right choice? Why?
• Think about who should be responsible for controlling obesity rates: individuals themselves, parents, local authorities, educational institutions, mass media, etc.
• Can obesity be considered a mental illness? Explain why.
• Analyze the effectiveness of warning statements on food labels as a preventative tool for obesity and chronic diseases in Australia. Should this practice be provided worldwide?
• Describe the most effective methods of obesity prevention in the US. What methods are used in other countries?
• Does education and the economic situation in the country play a role in the growing trend of obesity?
• Is obesity connected to a person’s behavior and lifestyle?
• Is obesity an international health issue? Provide arguments to your position.
• Does mass media influence obesity rates? How?
• What are the reasons for obesity in your school/college/community?
• Why is obesity a social problem? How can society address the issue?
• How do weight management and dietary changes influence a person’s health?
• Explain the importance of a well-balanced menu in the school cafeteria. Write a persuasive essay about promoting healthy meals in schools and restricting junk food.
• What nutritional programs are available in the US? Do they help lower obesity rates?
• Can obesity be considered a chronic or non-chronic disease?
• Does breastfeeding decrease the chances of occurrence of childhood obesity?
• Explain the meaning of healthy play places for children in terms of reducing obesity.
• How does the right kind of daily routine prevent obesity?

Obesity topics for research paper: discussing causes and consequences

There are many reasons why obesity occurs. To make the treatment more effective, we should find out what has caused the weight gain. Each case of obesity is unique, and therefore, the patient should undergo an individual treatment program. In this section you will find topics connected to the causes and consequences of obesity.

• Analyze the articles related to the reasons of obesity. Identify ideas presented in articles and define their viability.
• Is obesity connected to genetics? Can obesity be predicted?
• The obesity rates continue to rise. Why do you think this happens?
• Why are US immigrants more affected by obesity? Relate the environment and segregation to this issue.
• How do you think fast food restaurants influence the rising rates of obesity?
• Are women more prone to obesity? Why? In what counties or cultures?
• How is stress related to obesity? Find out the most recent publications on this issue.
• How does the urban environment affect obesity? Are people from big cities more prone to obesity than those who live in small towns and the countryside? Why?
• Define the obesity rates among African American citizens. What are the main causes of obesity?
• How does eating behavior depend on media and advertisement? Does it influence the occurrence of obesity?
• What is the life expectancy for people with obesity? What is the main identification? What are the solutions to increase this level?
• Analyze the scholarly article, “Genetic Influences on the Response of Body Fat and Fat Distribution to Positive and Negative Energy Balances in Human Identical Twins” by Claude Bouchard. What makes this research unique? What questions does the author strive to answer?
• Analyze the article “What’s Behind the Obesity Epidemic” by Carlotta Pozza and Andrea M. Isidori.
• Identify particular eating habits as an important cause of obesity. How does family eating habits influence obesity rates?
• Quantify the phenomenon of obesity in your region. Collect the data from reliable sources, identify reliability and validity, and interpret the received data.
• What are the negative effects of obesity on children/teenagers/adults?
• Analyze the causes and consequences of obesity among US military personnel.

Economics and sociology of obesity topics

Currently, a significant increase in the number of people suffering from being overweight has actually become a serious problem for ensuring sustainable socio-economic development at the state and local levels. Here are some topics connected with this issue.

• Can local socioeconomic status be associated with the causes of obesity?
• Analyze the film “The Weight of the Nation” about the obesity epidemic.
• Explain the influence of food prices and food quality on obesity. How to fix it?
• Analyze the film “Globesity” available online. What have you learned from the film? Describe how China and other countries can control the threat of obesity.
• Should the government play an active part in preventing obesity? What governmental regulations can help?
• Do people with obesity suffer from discrimination in the workplace? Is it legal?
• Discuss the situation of obesity in Latino communities in the US.
• Critically evaluate Zinczenko’s views on obesity, the fast food industry, and healthy food.
• Analyze the current situation of the food industry in the US. Do people have the opportunity to buy quality, healthy foods? Does the food industry influence obesity rates?
• Describe the current situation of obesity in the US. Provide statistical data, analyze the most frequent causes, and define the tendency. How does obesity affect the US economy and society?
• Will tax on sugary drinks lower the obesity rates? What economic effect will it lead? Give two other ways to decrease obesity level.
• Analyze the obesity rates among Maori or Islander citizens in New Zealand.
• Compare and contrast the situation with obesity rates in the US and Asian countries.
• What are the cultural differences related to obesity in India and China?
• Identify the ethical principles and issues in the context of the obesity epidemic.
• The role of body image on the rising occurrence of obesity.

Biology and treatment of obesity topics

Still, there is no single answer about the biological causes of obesity and influence of body state on the occurrence of this disease. Here are some insights into the problem from various perspectives.

• Describe metabolic complications and the role of fat distribution in people with obesity.
• Explain the linking mechanism between obesity, type 2 diabetes, and inflammation.
• What digestive diseases are associated with obesity?
• Explain the interconnection of insulin resistance and obesity.
• How does heart failure relate to obesity and type 2 diabetes?
• Explain the occurrence of bone fraction and obesity in women during menopause.
• Does obesity influence a woman’s childbearing experience?
• Explain the meaning of personal responsibility in relation to the US (or another country of your choice).
• Find out the influence of fructose and corn syrup on obesity and gaining weight.
• What is the obesity stigma? How does it worsen outcomes in obese people?
• Explain the effect of obesity on healthcare staff and personnel from the emergency unit. What are the underlying causes?
• Explain the relationship between endocrine-disrupting organotin and obesity.
• Analyze obesity from a sociological perspective. What is the role of sociological imagination?
• Compare and contrast obesity and anorexia. What health problems do they lead?
• Explain the influence of gut microbiome on obesity and metabolic syndrome.
• Explain the meaning of morbid obesity. What conditions are related to morbid obesity? Describe treatment methods and risks connected. Explain what may happen to a person if obesity is not treated.
• Can gastric bypass surgery cure obesity? How? In what cases?
• Explain the role of nurses in obesity treatment.
• Are there any drugs for obesity treatment? Are they effective? What side effects do they have? Why?
• What is the difference between being overweight and obesity? How do healthy nutrition and physical activity help to cure the disease?
• How can nurses monitor and negotiate the problem of obesity in and outside the hospital?

Obesity and being overweight are massive issues that can be discussed from many angles. As this problem is one of the most challenging issues of public health, it should be actively discussed at schools and colleges to raise awareness about the seriousness of this problem and how to prevent it.

How we can help with obesity papers writing

It can be hard to find a good topic on obesity, which is why we have created this list. We will be happy if one of our topics will inspire you on writing. This means that all of our efforts were not spent in vain! However, we know that finding a topic is only half of the way to writing a good essay. If you have troubles with writing, ask our expert writers to help you! Just fill in the order form on this page, or in an essay writing app and get assistance from EssayShark 24/7.

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11 thoughts on “ 90+ Obesity Essay Topics ”

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Of course, no. Here is the blog category to find topic to your taste – https://essayshark.com/blog/category/topics/

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Obesity: Risk factors, complications, and strategies for sustainable long‐term weight management

Sharon m. fruh.

1 College of Nursing, University of South Alabama, Mobile, Alabama

Background and Purpose

The aims of this article are to review the effects of obesity on health and well‐being and the evidence indicating they can be ameliorated by weight loss, and consider weight‐management strategies that may help patients achieve and maintain weight loss.

Narrative review based on literature searches of PubMed up to May 2016 with no date limits imposed. Search included terms such as “obesity,” “overweight,” “weight loss,” “comorbidity,” “diabetes,” cardiovascular,” “cancer,” “depression,” “management,” and “intervention.”

Conclusions

Over one third of U.S. adults have obesity. Obesity is associated with a range of comorbidities, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obstructive sleep apnea, and cancer; however, modest weight loss in the 5%–10% range, and above, can significantly improve health‐related outcomes. Many individuals struggle to maintain weight loss, although strategies such as realistic goal‐setting and increased consultation frequency can greatly improve the success of weight‐management programs. Nurse practitioners have key roles in establishing weight‐loss targets, providing motivation and support, and implementing weight‐loss programs.

Implications for Practice

With their in‐depth understanding of the research in the field of obesity and weight management, nurse practitioners are well placed to effect meaningful changes in weight‐management strategies deployed in clinical practice.

Introduction

Obesity is an increasing, global public health issue. Patients with obesity are at major risk for developing a range of comorbid conditions, including cardiovascular disease (CVD), gastrointestinal disorders, type 2 diabetes (T2D), joint and muscular disorders, respiratory problems, and psychological issues, which may significantly affect their daily lives as well as increasing mortality risks. Obesity‐associated conditions are manifold; however, even modest weight reduction may enable patients to reduce their risk for CVD, diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), and hypertension among many other comorbidities (Cefalu et al., 2015 ). A relatively small and simple reduction in weight, for example, of around 5%, can improve patient outcomes and may act as a catalyst for further change, with sustainable weight loss achieved through a series of incremental weight loss steps. In facilitating the process of losing weight for patients, nurse practitioners play an essential role. Through assessing the patient's risk, establishing realistic weight‐loss targets, providing motivation and support, and supplying patients with the necessary knowledge and treatment tools to help achieve weight loss, followed by tools for structured lifestyle support to maintain weight lost, the nurse practitioner is ideally positioned to help patient's achieve their weight‐loss—and overall health—targets.

The obesity epidemic

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines overweight and obesity as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health (WHO, 2016a ). A body mass index (BMI) ≥25 kg/m 2 is generally considered overweight, while obesity is considered to be a BMI ≥ 30 kg/m 2 . It is well known that obesity and overweight are a growing problem globally with high rates in both developed and developing countries (Capodaglio & Liuzzi, 2013 ; WHO, 2016a , 2016b ).

In the United States in 2015, all states had an obesity prevalence more than 20%, 25 states and Guam had obesity rates >30% and four of those 25 states (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia) had rates >35% (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016 ; Figure ​ Figure1). 1 ). Approximately 35% and 37% of adult men and women, respectively, in the United States have obesity (Yang & Colditz, 2015 ). Adult obesity is most common in non‐Hispanic black Americans, followed by Mexican Americans, and non‐Hispanic white Americans (Yang & Colditz, 2015 ). Individuals are also getting heavier at a younger age; birth cohorts from 1966 to 1975 and 1976 to 1985 reached an obesity prevalence of ≥20% by 20–29 years of age, while the 1956–1965 cohort only reached this prevalence by age 30–39 years (Lee et al., 2010 ). Additionally, the prevalence of childhood obesity in 2‐ to 17‐year‐olds in the United States has increased from 14.6% in 1999–2000 to 17.4% in 2013–2014 (Skinner & Skelton, 2014 ). Childhood obesity is an increasing health issue because of the early onset of comorbidities that have major adverse health impacts, and the increased likelihood of children with obesity going on to become adults with obesity (50% risk vs. 10% for children without obesity; Whitaker, Wright, Pepe, Seidel, & Dietz, 1997 ).

U.S. obesity epidemic 2015.

Source . Figure adapted from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/prevalence-maps.html .

Association of obesity with mortality and comorbid disease

Obesity is associated with a significant increase in mortality, with a life expectancy decrease of 5–10 years (Berrington de Gonzalez et al., 2010 ; Kuk et al., 2011 ; Prospective Studies Collaboration et al., 2009 ). There is evidence to indicate that all‐cause, CVD‐associated, and cancer‐associated mortalities are significantly increased in individuals with obesity, specifically those at Stages 2 or 3 of the Edmonton Obesity Staging System (EOSS; Kuk et al., 2011 ; Figure ​ Figure2). 2 ). Mortality related to cancer is, however, also increased at Stage 1, when the physical symptoms of obesity are marginal (Figure ​ (Figure2). 2 ). Recently, a large‐scale meta‐analysis that included studies that had enrolled over 10 million individuals, indicated that, relative to the reference category of 22.5 to <25 kg/m 2 , the hazard ratio (HR) for all‐cause mortality rose sharply with increasing BMI (The Global BMI Mortality Collaboration, 2016 ). For a BMI of 25.0 to <30.0 kg/m 2 , the HR was 1.11 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.10, 1.11), and this increased to 1.44 (1.41, 1.47), 1.92 (1.86, 1.98), and 2.71 (2.55, 2.86) for a BMI of 30.0 to <35.0, 35.0 to <40.0, and 40.0 to <60.0 kg/m 2 , respectively.

Association between EOSS stage and risk of all‐cause (A), CVD (B), cancer (C), and non‐CVD or noncancer mortality (D) in men and women. © 2011.

Source . Reproduced with permission from NRC Research Press, from Kuk et al. ( 2011 ). CVD, cardiovascular disease; NW, normal weight.

Comorbidities

Obesity is a chronic disease that is associated with a wide range of complications affecting many different aspects of physiology (Dobbins, Decorby, & Choi, 2013 ; Guh et al., 2009 ; Martin‐Rodriguez, Guillen‐Grima, Marti, & Brugos‐Larumbe, 2015 ; summarized in Table ​ Table1). 1 ). To examine these obesity‐related morbidities in detail is beyond the scope of this review and therefore only a brief overview of some of the key pathophysiological processes is included next.

Morbidities associated with obesity (Hamdy, 2016 ; Petry, Barry, Pietrzak, & Wagner, 2008 ; Pi‐Sunyer, 2009 ; Sakai et al., 2005 ; Smith, Hulsey, & Goodnight, 2008 ; Yosipovitch, DeVore, & Dawn, 2007 )

The progression from lean state to obesity brings with it a phenotypic change in adipose tissue and the development of chronic low‐grade inflammation (Wensveen, Valentic, Sestan, Turk Wensveen, & Polic, 2015 ). This is characterized by increased levels of circulating free‐fatty acids, soluble pro‐inflammatory factors (such as interleukin [IL] 1β, IL‐6, tumor necrosis factor [TNF] α, and monocyte chemoattractant protein [MCP] 1) and the activation and infiltration of immune cells into sites of inflammation (Hursting & Dunlap, 2012 ). Obesity is also usually allied to a specific dyslipidemia profile (atherogenic dyslipidemia) that includes small, dense low‐density lipoprotein (LDL) particles, decreased levels of high‐density lipoprotein (HDL) particles, and raised triglyceride levels (Musunuru, 2010 ). This chronic, low‐grade inflammation and dyslipidemia profile leads to vascular dysfunction, including atherosclerosis formation, and impaired fibrinolysis. These, in turn, increase the risk for CVD, including stroke and venous thromboembolism (Blokhin & Lentz, 2013 ).

The metabolic and cardiovascular aspects of obesity are closely linked. The chronic inflammatory state associated with obesity is established as a major contributing factor for insulin resistance, which itself is one of the key pathophysiologies of T2D (Johnson, Milner, & Makowski, 2012 ). Furthermore, central obesity defined by waist circumference is the essential component of the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) definition of the metabolic syndrome (raised triglycerides, reduced HDL cholesterol, raised blood pressure, and raised fasting plasma glucose; International Diabetes Federation, 2006 ).

Obesity is also closely associated with OSA. To start, a number of the conditions associated with obesity such as insulin resistance (Ip et al., 2002 ), systemic inflammation, and dyslipidemia are themselves closely associated with OSA, and concurrently, the obesity‐associated deposition of fat around the upper airway and thorax may affect lumen size and reduce chest compliance that contributes to OSA (Romero‐Corral, Caples, Lopez‐Jimenez, & Somers, 2010 ).

The development of certain cancers, including colorectal, pancreatic, kidney, endometrial, postmenopausal breast, and adenocarcinoma of the esophagus to name a few, have also been shown to be related to excess levels of fat and the metabolically active nature of this excess adipose tissue (Booth, Magnuson, Fouts, & Foster, 2015 ; Eheman et al., 2012 ). Cancers have shown to be impacted by the complex interactions between obesity‐related insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia, sustained hyperglycemia, oxidative stress, inflammation, and the production of adipokines (Booth et al., 2015 ). The wide range of morbidities associated with obesity represents a significant clinical issue for individuals with obesity. However, as significant as this array of risk factors is for patient health, the risk factors can be positively modified with weight loss.

Obesity‐related morbidities in children and adolescents

As was referred to earlier, children and adolescents are becoming increasingly affected by obesity. This is particularly concerning because of the long‐term adverse consequences of early obesity. Obesity adversely affects the metabolic health of young people and can result in impaired glucose tolerance, T2D, and early‐onset metabolic syndrome (Pulgaron, 2013 ).There is also strong support in the literature for relationships between childhood obesity and asthma, poor dental health (caries), nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD; Pulgaron, 2013 ). Obesity can also affect growth and sexual development and may delay puberty in boys and advance puberty in some girls (Burt Solorzano & McCartney, 2010 ). Childhood obesity is also associated with hyperandrogenism and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in girls (Burt Solorzano & McCartney, 2010 ). Additionally, obesity is associated with psychological problems in young people including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, depression, poor self‐esteem, and problems with sleeping (Pulgaron, 2013 ).

Modest weight loss and its long‐term maintenance: Benefits and risks

Guidelines endorse weight‐loss targets of 5%–10% in individuals with obesity or overweight with associated comorbidities, as this has been shown to significantly improve health‐related outcomes for many obesity‐related comorbidities (Cefalu et al., 2015 ; Figure ​ Figure3), 3 ), including T2D prevention, and improvements in dyslipidemia, hyperglycemia, osteoarthritis, stress incontinence, GERD, hypertension, and PCOS. Further benefits may be evident with greater weight loss, particularly for dyslipidemia, hyperglycemia, and hypertension. For NAFLD and OSA, at least 10% weight loss is required to observe clinical improvements (Cefalu et al., 2015 ).

Benefits of modest weight loss. Lines demonstrate the ranges in which weight loss has been investigated and shown to have clinical benefits. Arrows indicate that additional benefits may be seen with further weight loss.

Source . Figure adapted from Cefalu et al. ( 2015 ).

Importantly, the weight‐loss benefits in terms of comorbidities are also reflected in improved all‐cause mortality. A recent meta‐analysis of 15 studies demonstrated that relatively small amounts of weight loss, on average 5.5 kg in the treatment arm versus 0.2 kg with placebo from an average baseline BMI of 35 kg/m 2 , resulted in a substantial 15% reduction in all‐cause mortality (Kritchevsky et al., 2015 ).

Cardiovascular health

Weight loss is associated with beneficial changes in several cardiovascular risk markers, including dyslipidemia, pro‐inflammatory/pro‐thrombotic mediators, arterial stiffness, and hypertension (Dattilo & Kris‐Etherton, 1992 ; Dengo et al., 2010 ; Goldberg et al., 2014 ; Haffner et al., 2005 ; Ratner et al., 2005 ). Importantly, weight loss was found to reduce the risk for CVD mortality by 41% up to 23 years after the original weight‐loss intervention (Li et al., 2014 ; Figure ​ Figure4). 4 ). Evidence including the biological effects of obesity and weight loss, and the increased risk for stroke with obesity indicates that weight loss may be effective for primary‐ and secondary‐stroke prevention (Kernan, Inzucchi, Sawan, Macko, & Furie, 2013 ).

Reduction in cardiovascular mortality with modest weight reduction. Cumulative incidence of CVD mortality during 23 years of follow‐up in the Da Qing study (Li et al., 2014 ). Figure © 2014 Elsevier.

Source . Reproduced with permission from Li et al. ( 2014 ).

Type 2 diabetes

Three major long‐term studies, the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), the Diabetes Prevention Study (DPS), and the Da Qing IGT and Diabetes (Da Qing) study, have demonstrated that modest weight loss through short‐term lifestyle or pharmacologic interventions can reduce the risk for developing T2D by 58%, 58%, and 31%, respectively, in individuals with obesity and prediabetes (DPP Research Group et al., 2009 ; Pan et al., 1997 ; Tuomilehto et al., 2001 ). Long‐term benefits were maintained following the interventions; for example, in the DPP, the risk reduction of developing T2D versus placebo was 34% at 10 years and 27% at 15 years following the initial weight‐loss intervention (DPP Research Group, 2015 ; DPP Research Group et al., 2009 ). Weight loss increased the likelihood of individuals reverting from prediabetes to normoglycemia (DPP Research Group et al., 2009 ; Li et al., 2008 ; Lindstrom et al., 2003 , 2006 ; Tuomilehto et al., 2001 ), and also improved other aspects of glycemic control including fasting and postprandial glucose, and insulin sensitivity (Haufe et al., 2013 ; Li et al., 2008 ).

Sleep apnea

Data indicate that weight loss is beneficial, although not curative, in patients with obesity who experience OSA. Meta‐analyses of patients who underwent treatment with either intensive lifestyle intervention (Araghi et al., 2013 ) or bariatric surgery (Greenburg, Lettieri, & Eliasson, 2009 ) demonstrated improvements in apnea‐hypopnea index (AHI) following treatment. In the first of these meta‐analyses, in randomized controlled trials, lifestyle intervention lead to a mean reduction in BMI of 2.3 kg/m 2 , which was associated with a decrease in mean AHI of 6.0 events/h. As expected, weight loss was much higher in the second meta‐analysis that investigated the effect of bariatric surgery on measures of OSA, and this was associated with greater reductions in AHI; the mean BMI reduction of 17.9 kg/m 2 resulted in AHI events being reduced by a mean of 38.2 events/h. Once these improvements in AHI have occurred, they seem to persist for some time, irrespective of a certain degree of weight regain. In one study, an initial mean weight loss of 10.7 kg resulted in a persistent improvement in AHI over a 4‐year period despite weight regain of approximately 50% by Year 4 (Kuna et al., 2013 ).

Intentional weight loss of >9 kg reduced the risk for a range of cancers including breast, endometrium, and colon in the large‐scale Iowa Women's Health Study (Parker & Folsom, 2003 ). The overall reduction in the incidence rate of any cancer was 11% (relative risk, 0.89; 95% CI 0.79, 1.00) for participants who lost more than 9 kg compared with those who did not achieve a more than 9 kg weight loss episode. Additionally, weight loss in participants with obesity has been established to be associated with reductions in cancer biomarkers including soluble E‐selectin and IL‐6 (Linkov et al., 2012 ).

Additional health benefits

The substantial weight loss associated with bariatric surgery has been shown to improve asthma with a 48%–100% improvement in symptoms and reduction in medication use (Juel, Ali, Nilas, & Ulrik, 2012 ); however, there is a potential threshold effect so that modest weight loss of 5%–10% may lead to clinical improvement (Lv, Xiao, & Ma, 2015 ). Similarly, modest weight loss of 5%–10% improves GERD (Singh et al., 2013 ) and liver function (Haufe et al., 2013 ). A study utilizing MRI scanning to examine the effects of weight loss on NAFLD has reported a reduction in liver fat from 18.3% to 13.6% ( p = .03), a relative reduction of 25% (Patel et al., 2015 ). Taking an active role in addressing obesity through behavioral modifications or exercise can also reduce the symptoms of depression (Fabricatore et al., 2011 ), improve urinary incontinence in men and women (Breyer et al., 2014 ; Brown et al., 2006 ), and improve fertility outcomes in women (Kort, Winget, Kim, & Lathi, 2014 ). Additionally, weight loss can reduce the joint‐pain symptoms and disability caused by weight‐related osteoarthritis (Felson, Zhang, Anthony, Naimark, & Anderson, 1992 ; Foy et al., 2011 ).

Mitigating risks

Despite the array of benefits, weight loss can also be linked with certain risks that may need to be managed. One such example is the risk for gallstones with rapid weight loss, which is associated with gallstone formation in 30%–71% of individuals. Gallstone formation is particularly associated with bariatric surgery when weight loss exceeds 1.5 kg/week and occurs particularly within the first 6 weeks following surgery when weight loss is greatest. Slower rates of weight loss appear to mitigate the risk for gallstone formation compared to the general population but may not eliminate it entirely; as was noted in the year‐long, weight‐loss, SCALE trial that compared liraglutide 3.0 mg daily use to placebo and resulted in gallstone formation in 2.5% of treated subjects compared to 1% of subjects taking placebo. For this reason, the risk for cholethiasis should be considered when formulating weight‐loss programs (Weinsier & Ullmann, 1993 ).

Strategies to help individuals achieve and maintain weight loss

Rogge and Gautam have covered the biology of obesity and weight regain within another section of this supplement (Rogge & Gautam, 2017 ), so here we focus on some of the clinical strategies for delivering weight loss and weight loss maintenance lifestyle programs. Structured lifestyle support plays an important role in successful weight management. A total of 34% of participants receiving structured lifestyle support from trained‐nursing staff achieved weight loss of ≥5% over 12 weeks compared with approximately 19% with usual care (Nanchahal et al., 2009 ). This particular structured program, delivered in a primary healthcare setting, included initial assessment and goal setting, an eating plan and specific lifestyle goals, personalized activity program, and advice about managing obstacles to weight loss. Additionally, data from the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR), which is the longest prospective compilation of data from individuals who have successfully lost weight and maintained their weight loss, confirm expectations that sustained changes to both diet and activity levels are central to successful weight management (Table ​ (Table2). 2 ). Therefore, an understanding of different clinical strategies for delivery‐structured support is essential for the nurse practitioner.

Lifestyle factors associated with achieving and maintaining weight loss

Note . Data from (NWCR, 2016 ).

a Walking was the most common activity undertaken.

Realistic weight‐loss targets

From the outset, a patient's estimate of their achievable weight loss may be unrealistic. Setting realistic weight‐loss goals is often difficult because of misinformation from a variety of sources, including friends, media, and other healthcare professionals (Osunlana et al., 2015 ). Many individuals with obesity or overweight have unrealistic goals of 20%–30% weight loss, whereas a more realistic goal would be the loss of 5%–15% of the initial body weight (Fabricatore et al., 2007 ). Promoting realistic weight‐loss expectations for patients was identified as a key difficulty for nurse practitioners, primary care nurses, dieticians, and mental health workers (Osunlana et al., 2015 ). Visual resources showing the health and wellness benefit of modest weight loss may thus be helpful (Osunlana et al., 2015 ). Healthcare practitioners should focus on open discussion about, and re‐enforcement of, realistic weight‐loss goals and assess outcomes consistently according to those goals (Bray, Look, & Ryan, 2013 ).

Maintaining a food diary

The 2013 White Paper from the American Nurse Practitioners Foundation on the Prevention and Treatment of Obesity considers a food diary as an important evidence‐based nutritional intervention in aiding weight loss (ANPF). Consistent and regular recording in a food diary was significantly associated with long‐term weight‐loss success in a group of 220 women (Peterson et al., 2014 ). This group lost a mean of 10.4% of their initial body weight through a 6‐month group‐based weight‐management program and then regained a mean of 2.3% over a 12‐month follow‐up period, during which participants received bimonthly support in person, by telephone, or by e‐mail (Peterson et al., 2014 ). Over the 12‐month follow‐up, women who self‐monitored consistently (≥50% of the extended‐care year) had a mean weight loss of 0.98%, while those who were less consistent (<50%) gained weight (5.1%; p < .01). Therefore, frequent and consistent food monitoring should be encouraged, particularly in the weight‐maintenance phase of any program.

Motivating and supporting patients

Motivational interviewing is a technique that focuses on enhancing intrinsic motivation and behavioral changes by addressing ambivalence (Barnes & Ivezaj, 2015 ). Interviews focus on “change talk,” including the reasons for change and optimism about the intent for change in a supportive and nonconfrontational setting, and may help individuals maintain behavioral changes.

For patients that have achieved weight loss, the behavioral factors associated with maintaining weight loss include strong social support networks, limiting/avoiding disinhibited eating, avoiding binge eating, avoiding eating in response to stress or emotional issues, being accountable for one's decisions, having a strong sense of autonomy, internal motivation, and self‐efficacy (Grief & Miranda, 2010 ). Therefore, encouraging feelings of “self‐worth” or “self‐efficacy” can help individuals to view weight loss as being within their own control and achievable (Cochrane, 2008 ).

Strengthening relationships with patients with overweight or obesity to enhance trust may also improve adherence with weight‐loss programs. Patients with hypertension who reported having “complete trust” in their healthcare practitioner were more than twice as likely to engage in lifestyle changes to lose weight than those who lacked “complete trust” (Jones, Carson, Bleich, & Cooper, 2012 ). It may be prudent to ensure the healthcare staff implementing weight‐loss programs have sufficient time to foster trust with their patients.

Continued support from healthcare staff may help patients sustain the necessary motivation for lifestyle changes. A retrospective analysis of 14,256 patients in primary care identified consultation frequency as a factor that can predict the success of weight‐management programs (Lenoir, Maillot, Guilbot, & Ritz, 2015 ). Individuals who successfully maintained ≥10% weight loss over 12 months visited the healthcare provider on average 0.65 times monthly compared with an average of 0.48 visits/month in those who did not maintain ≥10% weight loss, and 0.39 visits/month in those who failed to achieve the initial ≥10% weight loss ( p < .001; Lenoir et al., 2015 ).

Educational and environmental factors

It is important to consider a patient's education and environment when formulating a weight loss strategy as environmental factors may need to be challenged to help facilitate weight loss. A family history of obesity and childhood obesity are strongly linked to adult obesity, which is likely to be because of both genetic and behavioral factors (Kral & Rauh, 2010 ). Parents create their child's early food experiences and influence their child's attitudes to eating through learned eating habits and food choices (Kral & Rauh, 2010 ). Families can also impart cultural preferences for less healthy food choices and family food choices may be affected by community factors, such as the local availability and cost of healthy food options (Castro, Shaibi, & Boehm‐Smith, 2009 ). Alongside this, genetic variation in taste sensation may influence the dietary palate and influence food choices (Loper, La Sala, Dotson, & Steinle, 2015 ). For example, sensitivity to 6‐n‐propylthiouracil (PROP) is genetically determined, and PROP‐tasting ability ranges from super taster to nontaster. When offered buffet‐style meals over 3 days, PROP nontasters consumed more energy, and a greater proportion of energy from fat compared with super tasters. So it is possible that a family's genetic profile could contribute to eating choices. To address behavioral factors, it is important to ensure that families have appropriate support and information and that any early signs of weight gain are dealt with promptly.

A healthy home food environment can help individuals improve their diet. In children, key factors are availability of fresh fruit and vegetables at home and parental influence through their own fresh fruit and vegetable intake (Wyse, Wolfenden, & Bisquera, 2015 ). In adults, unhealthy home food environment factors include less healthy food in the home and reliance on fast food ( p = .01) are all predictors of obesity (Emery et al., 2015 ).

Family mealtimes are strongly associated with better dietary intake and a randomized controlled trial to encourage healthy family meals showed a promising reduction in excess weight gain in prepubescent children (Fulkerson et al., 2015 ). Another study showed that adolescents with any level of baseline family meal frequency, 1–2, 3–4, and ≥5 family meals/week, had reduced odds of being affected by overweight or obesity 10 years later than adolescents who never ate family meals (Berge et al., 2015 ). Community health advocates have identified the failure of many families to plan meals or prepare food as a barrier to healthy family eating patterns (Fruh, Mulekar, Hall, Fulkerson et al., 2013 ). Meal planning allows healthy meals to be prepared in advance and frozen for later consumption (Fruh, Mulekar, Hall, Adams et al., 2013 ) and is associated with increased consumption of vegetables and healthier meals compared with meals prepared on impulse (Crawford, Ball, Mishra, Salmon, & Timperio, 2007 ; Hersey et al., 2001 ).

The role of the nurse practitioner

The initial and ongoing interactions between patient and nurse practitioner are keys for the determination of an effective approach and implementation of a weight loss program and subsequent weight maintenance. The initial interaction can be instigated by either the nurse practitioner or the patient and once the decision has been made to manage the patient's weight, the evaluation includes a risk assessment, a discussion about the patient's weight, and treatment goal recommendations (American Nurse Practitioner Foundation, 2013 ). Across this process, it may be advantageous to approach this using objective data and language that is motivational and/or nonjudgmental. Patients may struggle with motivation, and therefore, ongoing discussions around the health benefits and improvements to quality of life as a result of weight loss may be required (American Nurse Practitioner Foundation, 2013 ). It may be valuable to allocate personalized benefits to the weight loss such as playing with children/grandchildren (American Nurse Practitioner Foundation, 2013 ). Treatment approaches encompass nonpharmacological and pharmacological strategies; however, it is important to remember that any pharmacological agent used should be used as an adjunct to nutritional and physical activity strategies (American Nurse Practitioner Foundation, 2013 ). Pharmacotherapy options for weight management are discussed further in the article by Golden in this supplement.

Conclusions/summary

The importance of obesity management is underscored both by the serious health consequences for individuals, but also by its increasing prevalence globally, and across age groups in particular. Obesity promotes a chronic, low‐grade, inflammatory state, which is associated with vascular dysfunction, thrombotic disorders, multiple organ damage, and metabolic dysfunction. These physiological effects ultimately lead to the development of a range of morbidities, including CVD, T2D, OSA, and certain cancers along with many others, as well as causing a significant impact on mortality.

However, even modest weight loss of 5%–10% of total body weight can significantly improve health and well‐being, and further benefits are possible with greater weight loss. Weight loss can help to prevent development of T2D in individuals with obesity and prediabetes and has a positive long‐term impact on cardiovascular mortality. Beneficial, although not curative, effects have also been noted on OSA following >10% weight loss. In addition, weight loss reduces the risk for certain cancer types and has positive effects on most comorbidities including asthma, GERD, liver function, urinary incontinence, fertility, joint pain, and depression.

Weight‐loss programs that include realistic weight loss goals, frequent check‐in, and meal/activity diaries may help individuals to lose weight. Setting realistic weight‐loss goals can be difficult; however, visual resources showing the health and wellness benefit of weight loss may be helpful in discussing realistic goals, and help motivate the patient in maintaining the weight loss. Techniques such as motivational interviewing that focus on addressing resistance to behavioral change in a supportive and optimistic manner may help individuals in integrating these changes to allow them to become part of normal everyday life and thus help with maintaining the weight loss. Positive reinforcement in terms of marked early‐weight loss may also assist in improving adherence, so this should be a key goal for weight‐loss programs. Encouraging feelings of “self‐worth” or “self‐efficacy” can help individuals to view weight loss as being within their own control.

Nurse practitioners play a major role in helping patients achieve weight loss through all aspects of the process including assessment, support, motivation, goal‐setting, management, and treatment. With their in‐depth understanding of the research in the field of obesity and weight management, nurse practitioners are well placed to effect meaningful changes in the weight‐management strategies deployed in clinical practice.

List of helpful resources

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Watermeadow Medical for writing assistance in the development of this manuscript. This assistance was funded by Novo Nordisk, who also had a role in the review of the manuscript for scientific accuracy. The author discussed the concept, drafted the outline, commented in detail on the first iteration, made critical revision of later drafts, and has revised and approved the final version for submission.

Dr. Sharon Fruh serves on the Novo Nordisk Obesity Speakers Bureau. In compliance with national ethical guidelines, the author reports no relationship with business or industry that would post a conflict of interest.

Writing and editorial support was provided by Watermeadow Medical, and funded by Novo Nordisk.

The copyright line in this article was changed on 9 August 2018 after online publication.

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Obesity and Weight Loss Strategies Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Otc product and diet.

The obesity epidemic is among the most urgent healthcare issues in the United States and worldwide. According to recent estimations, between 39% and 49% of the world’s population are overweight or obese nowadays (Powell-Wiley et al., 2021). This trend has led to many people seeking weight loss through different means, including diet, eating behavior management, and pharmacological weight loss agents (Kushner, 2018). However, over-the-counter (OTC) weight loss products have also gained popularity despite serious health risks (Rodriguez-Guerra et al., 2021). Therefore, it is essential for healthcare professionals to keep the broad public well-informed about the nature and potential adverse effects of such products.

The model client is a 40-year-old man with a family history of obesity-related cardiovascular disease. The client pursues weight loss primarily out of concerns for personal health due to recently developed hypertension. The client has considered using an OTC, non-prescription herbal weight loss supplement, AMPK Metabolic Activator. The drug is advertised as a mixture of two botanical components that supposedly help the body burn stored abdominal fat (AMPK Metabolic Activator, n. d.). The patient’s product choice was primarily driven by the desire to achieve quick weight loss using natural products instead of synthetic medications.

However, the client was strongly advised against using OTC products due to a broad range of associated health hazards. Despite advertisement, most OTC herbal weight loss drugs are adulterated with active pharmaceutical agents (Dastjerdi et al., 2018). The pharmaceutical components in such products include tramadol, caffeine, fluoxetine, rizatriptan, venlafaxine, and methadone (Dastjerdi et al., 2018). Legal in most countries, these agents present serious health risks in case of excessive consumption. Furthermore, sibutramine, associated with a high risk of cardiovascular diseases even among consumers without a known history of CVDs, remains in many herbal medications (Rodriguez-Guerra et al., 2021). Therefore, the list of potential negative side-effects of the OTC weight loss products contradicts the client’s initial expectations and desires.

A healthier and more effective weight loss strategy is changing the lifestyle. Healthcare experts agree that weight loss depends primarily on reducing total caloric intake and sufficient physical activity (Kushner, 2018). Additionally, this strategy helps prevent a broad range of cardiovascular diseases and improves the overall physical condition. Therefore, a diet based on the client’s metabolic profile and health condition is the strategy’s primary focus. Experts recommend the calorie-reduced Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, rich in fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy products, for patients with hypertension (Kushner, 2018). The proposed day 1 menu would consist of the following:

• a whole-wheat bagel with 2 tablespoons peanut butter, an orange, and a cup of fat-free milk for breakfast;
• spinach salad with reduced-sodium wheat crackers for lunch;
• baked cod with 1/2 cup brown rice pilaf with vegetables, 1/2 cup fresh green beans, and herbal tea for dinner (Sample menus for the DASH diet, 2020).

This diet corresponds to the client’s goals and is optimal for his health profile.

Intermittent fasting (IF) has become an increasingly popular approach to treating obesity. Its proponents argue that the strategy is more effective in addressing weight loss than traditional daily caloric intake reduction (Halpern & Mendes, 2021). The IF advocates claim that high insulin levels in the organism associated with high carbohydrate intake facilitate the development of obesity. Intermittent fasting addresses this issue by reducing insulin levels via specially developed fasting schedules. However, experimental models in animals and humans have repeatedly discredited the insulin-related theory (Halpern & Mendes, 2021). Nevertheless, many people still see IF as a preferable alternative, mainly due to its widely marketed supposed benefits and the absence of strict dietary limitations and excessive physical activity.

Obesity remains a significant public health hazard globally, requiring the development and broad introduction of efficient and affordable weight loss strategies and programs. While many still resort to OTC medications and other questionable weight loss strategies, public health professionals and institutions must promote evidence-based approaches. These include safe, personally developed, balanced dietary measures, prescription pharmaceutical agents, and a healthy lifestyle with sufficient physical activity and caloric intake.

AMPK Metabolic Activator (n. d.). Life Extension. Web.

Dastjerdi, A. G., Akhgari, M., Kamali, A., & Mousavi, Z. (2018). Principal component analysis of synthetic adulterants in herbal supplements advertised as weight loss drugs . Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, 31 , 236–241. Web.

Halpern, B., & Mendes, T. B. (2021). Intermittent fasting for obesity and related disorders: unveiling myths, facts, and presumptions. Archives of Endocrinology and Metabolism, 65 (1). Web.

Kushner, R. F. (2018). Weight Loss Strategies for Treatment of Obesity: Lifestyle Management and Pharmacotherapy . Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases. Web.

Powell-Wiley, T. M., Poirier, P., Burke, L. E., J.-P., Després, Gordon-Larsen, P., Lavie, C. J., Lear,S. A., Ndumele, C. E., Neeland, I. J., Sanders, P., & St-Onge, M.-P. (2021). Obesity and cardiovascular disease: A scientific statement from the American Heart Association . Circulation, 143 (21), 984–1010. Web.

Rodriguez-Guerra, M., Yadav, M., Bhandari, M., Sinha, A., Bella, J. N., & Sklyar, E. (2021). Sibutramine as a cause of sudden cardiac death . Case Reports in Cardiology, 2021 , 1–5. Web.

Sample menus for the DASH diet (2020). Mayo Clinic. Web.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Obesity and Weight Loss Strategies." February 12, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/obesity-and-weight-loss-strategies/.

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Obesity and overweight

• In 2022, 1 in 8 people in the world were living with obesity. 
• Worldwide adult obesity has more than doubled since 1990, and adolescent obesity has quadrupled.
• In 2022, 2.5 billion adults (18 years and older) were overweight. Of these, 890 million were living with obesity.
• In 2022, 43% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight and 16% were living with obesity.
• In 2022, 37 million children under the age of 5 were overweight.
• Over 390 million children and adolescents aged 5–19 years were overweight in 2022, including 160 million who were living with obesity.

Overweight is a condition of excessive fat deposits.

Obesity is a chronic complex disease defined by excessive fat deposits that can impair health. Obesity can lead to increased risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease, it can affect bone health and reproduction, it increases the risk of certain cancers. Obesity influences the quality of living, such as sleeping or moving.

The diagnosis of overweight and obesity is made by measuring people’s weight and height and by calculating the body mass index (BMI): weight (kg)/height² (m²). The body mass index is a surrogate marker of fatness and additional measurements, such as the waist circumference, can help the diagnosis of obesity.

The BMI categories for defining obesity vary by age and gender in infants, children and adolescents.

For adults, WHO defines overweight and obesity as follows:

• overweight is a BMI greater than or equal to 25; and
• obesity is a BMI greater than or equal to 30.

For children, age needs to be considered when defining overweight and obesity.

Children under 5 years of age

For children under 5 years of age:

• overweight is weight-for-height greater than 2 standard deviations above WHO Child Growth Standards median; and
• obesity is weight-for-height greater than 3 standard deviations above the WHO Child Growth Standards median.

Charts and tables: WHO child growth standards for children aged under 5 years

Children aged between 5–19 years

Overweight and obesity are defined as follows for children aged between 5–19 years:

• overweight is BMI-for-age greater than 1 standard deviation above the WHO Growth Reference median; and
• obesity is greater than 2 standard deviations above the WHO Growth Reference median.

Charts and tables: WHO growth reference for children aged between 5–19 years

Facts about overweight and obesity

In 2022, 2.5 billion adults aged 18 years and older were overweight, including over 890 million adults who were living with obesity. This corresponds to 43% of adults aged 18 years and over (43% of men and 44% of women) who were overweight; an increase from 1990, when 25% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight. Prevalence of overweight varied by region, from 31% in the WHO South-East Asia Region and the African Region to 67% in the Region of the Americas.

About 16% of adults aged 18 years and older worldwide were obese in 2022. The worldwide prevalence of obesity more than doubled between 1990 and 2022.

In 2022, an estimated 37 million children under the age of 5 years were overweight. Once considered a high-income country problem, overweight is on the rise in low- and middle-income countries. In Africa, the number of overweight children under 5 years has increased by nearly 23% since 2000. Almost half of the children under 5 years who were overweight or living with obesity in 2022 lived in Asia.

Over 390 million children and adolescents aged 5–19 years were overweight in 2022. The prevalence of overweight (including obesity) among children and adolescents aged 5–19 has risen dramatically from just 8% in 1990 to 20% in 2022. The rise has occurred similarly among both boys and girls: in 2022 19% of girls and 21% of boys were overweight.

While just 2% of children and adolescents aged 5–19 were obese in 1990 (31 million young people), by 2022, 8% of children and adolescents were living with obesity (160 million young people).

Causes of overweight and obesity

Overweight and obesity result from an imbalance of energy intake (diet) and energy expenditure (physical activity).

In most cases obesity is a multifactorial disease due to obesogenic environments, psycho-social factors and genetic variants. In a subgroup of patients, single major etiological factors can be identified (medications, diseases, immobilization, iatrogenic procedures, monogenic disease/genetic syndrome).

The obesogenic environment exacerbating the likelihood of obesity in individuals, populations and in different settings is related to structural factors limiting the availability of healthy sustainable food at locally affordable prices, lack of safe and easy physical mobility into the daily life of all people, and absence of adequate legal and regulatory environment.

At the same time, the lack of an effective health system response to identify excess weight gain and fat deposition in their early stages is aggravating the progression to obesity.

Common health consequences

The health risks caused by overweight and obesity are increasingly well documented and understood.

In 2019, higher-than-optimal BMI caused an estimated 5 million deaths from noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancers, neurological disorders, chronic respiratory diseases, and digestive disorders (1) . 

Being overweight in childhood and adolescence affects children’s and adolescents’ immediate health and is associated with greater risk and earlier onset of various NCDs, such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Childhood and adolescent obesity have adverse psychosocial consequences; it affects school performance and quality of life, compounded by stigma, discrimination and bullying. Children with obesity are very likely to be adults with obesity and are also at a higher risk of developing NCDs in adulthood.

The economic impacts of the obesity epidemic are also important. If nothing is done, the global costs of overweight and obesity are predicted to reach US$ 3 trillion per year by 2030 and more than US$ 18 trillion by 2060 (2) .

Finally, the rise in obesity rates in low-and middle-income countries, including among lower socio-economic groups, is fast globalizing a problem that was once associated only with high-income countries.

Facing a double burden of malnutrition

Many low- and middle-income countries face a so-called double burden of malnutrition.

While these countries continue to deal with the problems of infectious diseases and undernutrition, they are also experiencing a rapid upsurge in noncommunicable disease risk factors such as obesity and overweight.

It is common to find undernutrition and obesity co-existing within the same country, the same community and the same household.

Children in low- and middle-income countries are more vulnerable to inadequate pre-natal, infant, and young child nutrition. At the same time, these children are exposed to high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt, energy-dense, and micronutrient-poor foods, which tend to be lower in cost but also lower in nutrient quality. These dietary patterns, in conjunction with lower levels of physical activity, result in sharp increases in childhood obesity while undernutrition issues remain unsolved.

Prevention and management

Overweight and obesity, as well as their related noncommunicable diseases, are largely preventable and manageable.

At the individual level, people may be able to reduce their risk by adopting preventive interventions at each step of the life cycle, starting from pre-conception and continuing during the early years. These include:

• ensure appropriate weight gain during pregnancy;
• practice exclusive breastfeeding in the first 6 months after birth and continued breastfeeding until 24 months or beyond;
• support behaviours of children around healthy eating, physical activity, sedentary behaviours and sleep, regardless of current weight status;
• limit screen time;
• limit consumption of sugar sweetened beverages and energy-dense foods and promote other healthy eating behaviours;
• enjoy a healthy life (healthy diet, physical activity, sleep duration and quality, avoid tobacco and alcohol, emotional self-regulation);
• limit energy intake from total fats and sugars and increase consumption of fruit and vegetables, as well as legumes, whole grains and nuts; and
• engage in regular physical activity.

Health practitioners need to

• assess the weight and height of people accessing the health facilities;
• provide counselling on healthy diet and lifestyles;
• when a diagnosis of obesity is established, provide integrated obesity prevention and management health services including on healthy diet, physical activity and medical and surgical measures; and
• monitor other NCD risk factors (blood glucose, lipids and blood pressure) and assess the presence of comorbidities and disability, including mental health disorders.

The dietary and physical activity patterns for individual people are largely the result of environmental and societal conditions that greatly constrain personal choice. Obesity is a societal rather than an individual responsibility, with the solutions to be found through the creation of supportive environments and communities that embed healthy diets and regular physical activity as the most accessible, available and affordable behaviours of daily life.

Stopping the rise in obesity demands multisectoral actions such as food manufacturing, marketing and pricing and others that seek to address the wider determinants of health (such as poverty reduction and urban planning).

Such policies and actions include:

• structural, fiscal and regulatory actions aimed at creating healthy food environments that make healthier food options available, accessible and desirable; and
• health sector responses designed and equipped to identify risk, prevent, treat and manage the disease. These actions need to build upon and be integrated into broader efforts to address NCDs and strengthen health systems through a primary health care approach.

The food industry can play a significant role in promoting healthy diets by:

• reducing the fat, sugar and salt content of processed foods;
• ensuring that healthy and nutritious choices are available and affordable to all consumers;
• restricting marketing of foods high in sugars, salt and fats, especially those foods aimed at children and teenagers; and
• ensuring the availability of healthy food choices and supporting regular physical activity practice in the workplace.

WHO response

WHO has recognized the need to tackle the global obesity crisis in an urgent manner for many years .

The World Health Assembly Global Nutrition Targets aiming to ensure no increase in childhood overweight, and the NCD target to halt the rise of diabetes and obesity by 2025, were endorsed by WHO Member States. They recognized that accelerated global action is needed to address pervasive and corrosive problem of the double burden of malnutrition.

At the 75 th World Health Assembly in 2022, Member States demanded and adopted new recommendations for the prevention and management of obesity and endorsed the WHO Acceleration plan to stop obesity . Since its endorsement, the Acceleration plan has shaped the political environment to generate impetus needed for sustainable change, created a platform to shape, streamline and prioritize policy, support implementation in countries and drive impact and strengthen accountability at national and global level.

1. GBD 2019 Risk Factor Collaborators. “Global Burden of 87 Risk Factors in 204 Countries and Territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the global burden of disease study 2019”. Lancet. 2020;396:1223–1249.

2. Okunogbe et al., “Economic Impacts of Overweight and Obesity.” 2nd Edition with Estimates for 161 Countries. World Obesity Federation, 2022.

• Body Mass Index (BMI)
• WHO Child Growth Standards
• Growth reference data for 5-19 years

WHO Strategy

• Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health
• Global Health Observatory (GHO)

More information

• WHO's work on obesity
• WHO's work on nutrition

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• Review Article
• Published: 27 February 2019

Obesity: global epidemiology and pathogenesis

• Matthias Blüher 1  

Nature Reviews Endocrinology volume  15 ,  pages 288–298 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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• Epidemiology
• Health policy
• Pathogenesis

The prevalence of obesity has increased worldwide in the past ~50 years, reaching pandemic levels. Obesity represents a major health challenge because it substantially increases the risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes mellitus, fatty liver disease, hypertension, myocardial infarction, stroke, dementia, osteoarthritis, obstructive sleep apnoea and several cancers, thereby contributing to a decline in both quality of life and life expectancy. Obesity is also associated with unemployment, social disadvantages and reduced socio-economic productivity, thus increasingly creating an economic burden. Thus far, obesity prevention and treatment strategies — both at the individual and population level — have not been successful in the long term. Lifestyle and behavioural interventions aimed at reducing calorie intake and increasing energy expenditure have limited effectiveness because complex and persistent hormonal, metabolic and neurochemical adaptations defend against weight loss and promote weight regain. Reducing the obesity burden requires approaches that combine individual interventions with changes in the environment and society. Therefore, a better understanding of the remarkable regional differences in obesity prevalence and trends might help to identify societal causes of obesity and provide guidance on which are the most promising intervention strategies.

Obesity prevalence has increased in pandemic dimensions over the past 50 years.

Obesity is a disease that can cause premature disability and death by increasing the risk of cardiometabolic diseases, osteoarthritis, dementia, depression and some types of cancers.

Obesity prevention and treatments frequently fail in the long term (for example, behavioural interventions aiming at reducing energy intake and increasing energy expenditure) or are not available or suitable (bariatric surgery) for the majority of people affected.

Although obesity prevalence increased in every single country in the world, regional differences exist in both obesity prevalence and trends; understanding the drivers of these regional differences might help to provide guidance for the most promising intervention strategies.

Changes in the global food system together with increased sedentary behaviour seem to be the main drivers of the obesity pandemic.

The major challenge is to translate our knowledge of the main causes of increased obesity prevalence into effective actions; such actions might include policy changes that facilitate individual choices for foods that have reduced fat, sugar and salt content.

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Obesity as a Disease: A White Paper on Evidence and Arguments Commissioned by the Council of The Obesity Society

TOS Obesity as a Disease Writing Group

Corresponding Author

David B. Allison

Department of Biostatistics and Clinical Nutrition Research Center, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, USA

Morgan Downey

NAASO, The Obesity Society, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA

Richard L. Atkinson

Virginia Commonwealth University and Obetech Obesity Research Center, Richmond, Virginia, USA

Charles J. Billington

Department of Medicine, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

George A. Bray

Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA

Robert H. Eckel

Department of Medicine, University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, Colorado, USA

Eric A. Finkelstein

RTI International, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA

Michael D. Jensen

Department of Internal Medicine, Mayo Clinic and Foundation, Rochester, Minnesota, USA

Angelo Tremblay

Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, Laval University, Ste-Foy, Quebec, Canada

Executive Summary

The Obesity Society (TOS) commissioned a panel of experts from among its members to undertake a review of the issue of labeling obesity a disease and to examine pertinent evidence and arguments. The panel unanimously and strongly stated that obesity is a complex condition with many causal contributors, including many factors that are largely beyond individuals' control; that obesity causes much suffering; that obesity causally contributes to ill health, functional impairment, reduced quality of life, serious disease, and greater mortality; that successful treatment, although difficult to achieve, produces many benefits; that obese persons are subject to enormous societal stigma and discrimination; and that obese persons deserve better.

Whether obesity should be declared a disease is controversial, and thoughtful arguments have been made on both sides of the issue. The panel recognized that there is a clear majority view among the general public as well as among authoritative bodies that it is reasonable to call obesity a disease. The panel reviewed three broad classes of argument as to whether obesity is rightly classified as a disease.

The first, the scientific approach, proceeds in two conceptually simple steps: i) identify the characteristics that entities must have to be considered diseases and ii) examine empirical evidence to determine whether obesity possesses those characteristics. The scientific approach would be well suited to answering the question “is obesity a disease?” rather than “should we consider obesity a disease?,” were the former question answerable. However, after much deliberation, the panel concluded that the former question is ill posed and does not admit an answer. This is not because of a lack of agreement or understanding about obesity but rather because of a lack of a clear, specific, widely accepted, and scientifically applicable definition of “disease” that allows one to objectively and empirically determine whether specific conditions are diseases.

The second type of argument, the forensic approach, entailed looking to the public statements of authoritative bodies as evidence of whether obesity is a disease or should be considered a disease. A nearly exhaustive search for and consideration of the statements made by ostensibly authoritative bodies made apparent that there is a clear and strong majority leaning—although not complete consensus—toward obesity being a disease. However, although some authoritative bodies have offered statements that obesity is (or is not) a disease, very few of them have published a thorough and rigorous argument or evidential basis in support of the statement. Moreover, and far more importantly, the panel held that the opinions of authoritative bodies tell us—at most—what is lawful, consistent with mainstream opinions, or likely to be supported by others. Such opinions are insufficient to tell us what is true or what is right. The panel strongly endorsed the position that there can be no higher authority than reason. Hence, the forensic approach was judged to be inadequate to help us determine either whether obesity is a disease or whether it should be considered a disease.

The third approach to this question we termed the utilitarian approach. Recognizing that there is no clear agreed-on definition of disease with precise, assessable criteria that can be articulated, it seems that conditions that produce adverse health outcomes come to be considered diseases as the result of a social process when it is assessed to be beneficial to the greater good that they be so judged. Such judgments about likely benefit to the greater good are utilitarian judgments that may take empirical input but must also assume certain values. We considered the likely outcomes of considering obesity to be a disease to address the question “should obesity be declared a disease?” (as opposed to “is obesity a disease?”). Necessarily, our utilitarian analysis was speculative. The disease label tends to confer certain benefits, obligations, motivations, and legal considerations in our society.

The panel concluded that considering obesity a disease is likely to have far more positive than negative consequences and to benefit the greater good by soliciting more resources into prevention, treatment, and research of obesity; encouraging more high-quality caring professionals to view treating the obese patient as a vocation worthy of effort and respect; and reducing the stigma and discrimination heaped on many obese persons. The panel felt that this utilitarian analysis was a legitimate approach to addressing the topic, as well as the approach used for many other conditions labeled diseases, even if not explicitly so. Thus, although one cannot scientifically prove either that obesity is a disease or that it is not a disease, a utilitarian approach supports the position that obesity should be declared a disease.

The prevalence of obesity has been increasing for over a century ( 1 ) and has increased substantially in the past several decades ( 2 ). Clear and consistent evidence shows that obesity increases the risk of many morbidities and reduces both the quality and the quantity of life ( 3 , 4 , 5 ). These facts lead many to conclude that the time for concerted action to reduce levels of obesity and the deleterious effects of obesity is clearly upon us. In preparing for such action and in an attempt to enlist the participation and aid of broad sectors of society, many believe that labeling obesity a disease and having society accept this label is vital. However, is the label warranted? Prominent obesity experts have offered the opinion that it is indeed warranted, but equally prominent (although fewer) obesity experts have disagreed.

Similarly, writers in the mass media, advocates for obese persons' rights and welfare, and members of the general public have also expressed strong opinions both for and against the appropriateness of labeling obesity a disease. The National Consumers Union reported that in a national survey 78% of respondents somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement “obesity is a serious chronic disease” and 22% did not ( 6 ). Given this diversity of views, TOS commissioned a panel of experts from among its members to undertake a rigorous review of the issue of labeling obesity a disease and of the pertinent evidence and arguments. This report presents the results of that review.

The Question to be Addressed

The formal question to be addressed is “should obesity be considered a disease?.” This question is closely related to but fundamentally distinct from the question “is obesity a disease?.” The panel concluded that the latter question—a seemingly empirical question that should (in principle) yield to scientific inquiry—is ill posed in that its sensibility is based on premises that are not true. It is therefore insensible and unanswerable. In contrast, “should obesity be considered a disease?” is a question that is fundamentally not empirical or scientific. Its reliance on the word “should” (read equally “ought”) immediately signals that it is a social, political, and fundamentally ethical and moral question ( 7 ), because what one should do depends not only on the likely effects of one's actions (empirical input) but fundamentally on how one values various outcomes. Such values, although scientifically estimable, are not scientifically determinable. That is, although ethical and moral questions may be addressed in part by using scientifically generated empirical input ( 8 ), such questions should not be conflated with scientifically evaluable empirical questions that concern matters of fact rather than matters of value. Finally, there is substantial interest in many contexts as to whether obesity constitutes a disability (e.g., refs. 9 , 10 ); to avoid any confusion, we note that this should be recognized as a distinct question that we are not addressing here.

Why are we addressing this?

As others have remarked (e.g., ref. 11 ) and as we elaborate below, whether obesity is considered a disease may have a profound impact on the lives of millions of obese individuals as well as on multiple aspects of our society. We therefore believe that, as the leading professional obesity society in North America, TOS has the obligation to provide leadership on this issue. We hope that by providing an answer to the question of whether obesity should be considered a disease—an answer that is based on sound reasoning and represents the collective wisdom of this leading professional society—we may catalyze society at large to come to a consensus view on this point. In turn, we hope that reaching such a consensus may enable efforts to ameliorate the problems of obesity to move forward more effectively.

Our panel struggled with the complexity of the issues surrounding the question; the members held a diversity of views, as did the field of obesity researchers. Nevertheless, the panel's members wish to note that there was absolutely no disagreement on the following fundamental points, which we voice loudly and clearly:

    •Obesity is a complex condition with many causal contributors, including genetic ones and many environmental factors that are largely beyond individuals' abilities to choose or control ( 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ).

    •Obesity causes much suffering.

    •Obesity causally leads to many aspects of ill health ( 16 ), to functional impairment ( 17 ) and reduced quality of life ( 18 ), to serious disease ( 4 ), and to greater mortality ( 19 ). Successful treatment, although difficult to achieve, produces many benefits, including prevention of disease ( 20 ) and reduced mortality rate ( 21 , 22 , 23 ).

    •Obese persons are subject to severe societal discrimination in ways that those with seemingly similar chronic conditions, such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, and diabetes, are not. For example, obese individuals are waited on more slowly by salespersons, less likely to be rented apartments, less likely to be offered jobs, even when as qualified as other applicants, and less likely to receive support for higher education from parents, and often are looked down on by educators and health professionals ( 24 , 25 , 26 ).

These points underpin our concern for obese individuals and provide the motivation for undertaking the charge of this panel.

The process of developing this document

The Executive Committee of TOS wished to have a formal position statement on whether obesity is justifiably called and should be declared a disease and commissioned this white paper as a critical evaluation of relevant arguments and evidence. The panel, convened from among TOS's leaders and members, equally represented those who had previously expressed skepticism and those who had expressed belief that obesity is justifiably called a disease. The panel attempted to conduct an exhaustive search of the professional literature on this topic, discussed the various arguments that had been advanced, and agreed that the highest standards of intellectual rigor should be applied when considering the cogency of any position. Differences of opinion were discussed until consensus was reached in most cases. Some topics resisted consensus, and the panel members' divergent viewpoints are reflected in this document. The final draft was presented to TOS's council to be used as a basis of informed decision making about whether to offer a formal position statement on obesity as a disease and, if so, what that position should be.

What is obesity?

We define obesity as an excess of body fat. It may be of either total body fat or a particular depot of body fat. The excess may even be in the morphology and function of body fat such that, for example, adipocytes, independent of total fat mass or fat mass distribution, are excessively enlarged. The adverse health consequences of accumulation of enlarged visceral or other adipocytes may tentatively be accounted for by enhanced secretion of most products of adipocytes that act as endocrine and paracrine factors on other cells, as well as the reduced production of adiponectin ( 27 ). Note that we do not define obesity as a BMI greater than or equal to 30 kg/m 2 . That is a useful operational definition ( 28 ) for many contexts but should not be used as the conceptual definition. Even as an operational definition, a BMI greater than 30 may not be ideal, and authors are beginning to question whether the field should adopt a more useful operational definition (e.g., refs. 29 , 30 ).

In our definition of obesity, excess of body fat denotes an amount sufficiently large to cause reduced health or longevity. This reduction in health will not be noticeable in all cases and may not be realized immediately, but obesity probabilistically threatens to reduce health in the future even if no health impairment is observed in an individual in the present. For example, as fat cells increase in size, they begin to produce substances (e.g., tumor necrosis factor-α) in excess of normal levels. For some people this causes insulin resistance and diabetes, but for others who have sufficient adaptive capacity, no deterioration of body function or health is apparent. As with hypertension and elevated blood glucose, many people initially demonstrate no obvious health problem yet health deteriorates over time.

The effects of accumulation of adipose tissue depots and possibly of enlarged adipocytes appear to vary as a function of age, ethnicity, sex, and other factors. Hence, operational definitions of obesity may also need to vary as a function of these factors even if the conceptual definition remains constant.

How might one approach the question “should obesity be considered a disease?”

To address the question of whether obesity should be considered a disease, we identified three major approaches that have been or could be used, approaches that go beyond rhetorical assertions. We term these the “scientific approach,” the “forensic approach,” and the “utilitarian approach.” (Commonly used arguments that we believe to be patently invalid and worthy of only brief consideration are listed in Appendix 1.) The authors of most documents that attempt to address the issue of obesity as a disease have not described a thorough and organized argument or approach to reaching their conclusions. This does not necessarily mean that they did not use such an argument or approach, only that none was described. Authors who have tried to be more thorough and rigorous in their analysis have generally used the scientific approach, the forensic approach, or both. In this document we argue that the scientific and forensic approaches are not useful in addressing this question and then move to the utilitarian approach, which, to our knowledge, has not been used as a primary approach. We argue that this is the most appropriate approach and use it to form the basis of our conclusion.

Historical Perspective

More than 2,500 years ago the physician Hippocrates, often called the father of medicine, recognized that people who were overweight were at higher risk for sudden death. Closer to our times, Malcolm Flemyng, a physician from the 18th century who wrote one of the two earliest books on overweight in the English language, stated that “corpulency” (i.e., obesity) can be a disease in some cases. Table 1 lists historical quotations on obesity as a disease, from the 1600s to 1934. Inspection of these quotations makes clear that the idea that obesity may appropriately be called a disease is not new; it has recurred throughout the past several hundred years. Multiple authors (see, for example, refs. 31 , 32 , 33 ) said that obesity is appropriately considered a disease only when it reaches a certain degree of severity, implying that they conceived of obesity as a disease in some but clearly not all cases. Conversely, some authors (e.g., refs. 36 , 37 ) said that obesity is not a disease in all cases, implying that it is in some. None of these authors provided a through discussion of why obesity should or should not be considered a disease. The primary form of “argument” used was simply ipse dixit , a rhetorical assertion without a valid supporting argument. This has been the most commonly used approach to this issue, even in the past 20 years, and remains the one in most frequent use.

Arguments and Evidence: the Scientific Approach

Explication of the approach in general terms.

The scientific approach is well suited to the question “is obesity a disease?” or, more abstractly and generically, to the question “does a class of entities A rightly belong as a subset of the larger class of entities denoted B?” Phrased in this more generic way, the way to proceed is obvious. It involves two conceptually simple steps. Step 1 is to identify the characteristics that entities must have to be considered members of class B. Step 2 is to examine empirical evidence to determine whether all entities in class A possess those characteristics. This is an approach taken by several authors (e.g., refs. 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 ), at least one legal proceeding ( 43 ), and a recent video, “Is Obesity a Disease?,” produced by the American Medical Association (AMA) ( 44 ) and offered on the website of the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality ( 45 ).

Some key facts about obesity

Some key facts are germane in attempting to scientifically address the issue of obesity as a disease. In most cases, these facts are well known and well established and we do not dwell on the evidential basis. Instead, we simply state the fact and refer to an appropriate source for details of supporting evidence.

    1. Obesity (or, more precisely, variations in BMI or body fat mass among individuals) has many causes both across and within individuals ( 12 , 13 , 14 ).

    2. The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially in the past half century, both within the United States and globally. This increase has occurred in virtually every age, race, and sex group ( 46 ). A current estimate is that roughly one-third of US adults (more than 50 million persons) are obese ( 46 ).

    3. Obesity increases the risk of many morbidities ( 5 , 41 , 47 ) and reduces quality of life ( 18 ), functional capacity ( 17 ), and lifespan ( 19 ).

    4. Animal model studies ( 48 , 49 , 50 ), studies of lifestyle intervention in humans ( 20 ), and studies of bariatric surgery in humans ( 21 , 22 , 23 ) all show that when weight and fat loss can be induced by medically recommended interventions among obese organisms, morbidities are reduced and lifespan can be increased.*

    5. Statement 3 applies in probability; that is, any obese individual may experience only minor adverse effects of obesity in any one or more of these categories and may experience no adverse effects of obesity in some categories ( 39 , 41 , 51 ).

    6. Apart from an expanded fat mass, which is inherent in the definition of obesity used herein and in a prior TOS (formerly NAASO) position statement ( 52 ), there is no characteristic sign or symptom that is present in all obese persons ( 39 ).

    7. Obesity, at least when operationally defined as the exceeding of a specific amount of body fat or a specific BMI, is also associated with certain health benefits ( 53 ). These include the now rarely needed but obvious protection against starvation in times of food scarcity ( 54 ), protection against osteoporosis and fractures in the elderly ( 51 ), possible prevention of frailty in the elderly, reduced mortality rate in the elderly with mild obesity ( 55 ), and reduced mortality rate in certain severe illnesses or injuries ( 56 ). The extent to which these associations represent causation is not clear in all cases.

Definitions of disease

Kincaid ( 57 ) wrote, “There is a long-standing debate, inside medicine and out, about how to define disease and whether such definitions are value free.…The two predominant attempts at value-free notions of health are the biostatistical theory…and evolutionary functions approaches. The biostatistical theory holds that disease is deviation from species-typical functioning; disease is deviation from the average. In the evolutionary function view, disease occurs when an organ is not performing the job that allowed it to evolve via natural selection.”

Taking a somewhat different approach, Heshka and Allison ( 39 ) consulted multiple ordinary and medical dictionaries and extracted four points common to most definitions of disease:

    “(a) a condition of the body, its parts, organs, or systems, or an alteration thereof;

    (b) resulting from infection, parasites, nutritional, dietary, environmental, genetic, or other causes;

    (c) having a characteristic, identifiable, marked, group of symptoms or signs;

    (d) deviation from normal structure or function (variously described as abnormal structure or function; incorrect function; impairment of normal state; interruption, disturbance, cessation, disorder, derangement of bodily or organ functions).”

Taking a similar approach, the American Medical Association ( 44 ) offered the three points depicted in Figure 1 and indicated that all three conditions need to be met to for obesity to be defined as a disease.

A screen capture from the American Medical Association's video “Is Obesity a Disease?” ( 44 ).

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advanced a definition of disease based on an extensive, thoughtful process. Following enactment of the Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act (DSHEA) ( 58 ), the FDA had to establish a definition of disease. The manufacturers of dietary supplements would not be allowed to make statements that a dietary supplement product could be used to diagnose, treat, prevent, cure, or mitigate a disease but could make claims about the product's effects on the structure or function of the body. The FDA process, which began in 1998, involved numerous public comments and a public hearing that involved senior FDA officials and representatives of a broad cross-section of scientific, medical, industry, and advocacy organizations ( 59 ). At the end of the process, the agency decided to retain a definition issued in 1993 as part of the implementation of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act ( 60 ), which defines disease as “damage to an organ, part, structure, or system of the body such that it does not function properly (e.g., cardiovascular disease), or a state of health leading to such dysfunctioning (e.g., hypertension); except that diseases resulting from essential nutrient deficiencies (e.g., scurvy, pellagra) are not included in this definition.” As indicated in Appendix 2, the FDA subsequently concluded that obesity is a disease by this definition ( 61 ).

Downey ( 40 ) and Conway and Rene ( 41 ) relied on a definition of disease found in Stedman's Medical Dictionary that Downey described as a representative definition: “1. An interruption, cessation, or disorder of body functions, systems, or organs. Syn. Illness, morbus, sickness. 2. A morbid entity characterized usually by at least two of these criteria: recognized etiologic agent(s), identifiable group of signs and symptoms, or consistent anatomical alterations. See Also: syndrome. 3. Literally, dis-ease, the opposite of ease, when something is wrong with a bodily function.”

Consideration of the above definitions begins to make apparent some of the difficulties with this approach. Are the definitions equivalent? If not, whose definition should be considered paramount? Are the definitions precisely interpretable and applicable? Are they sensible on their face, likely to admit to the class of diseases all the entities that common parlance and societal consensus accept as diseases, and likely to reject from the class of diseases all the entities that common parlance and societal consensus would not accept as diseases?

What can we conclude if we take this approach strictly?

With respect to what Kincaid ( 57 ) terms the biostatistical theory, it would be difficult to argue that obesity constitutes a statistical rarity given that roughly one-third of the US adult population is obese. Moreover, even if we allowed that one-third was a sufficient minority for obesity to merit the disease appellation, such a decision process would invalidate that conclusion if obesity occurred in more than 50% of the population, as some authors have speculated it will (e.g., ref. 62 ). The decision to declassify a condition as a disease simply because too many people have it makes little sense.

In the evolutionary function approaches described by Kincaid ( 57 ), “disease occurs when an organ is not performing the job that allowed it to evolve via natural selection.” However, apparently not all would accept such a definition. For example, a document issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said that irritable bowel disease is not a disease: “It's a functional disorder, meaning that the bowel doesn't work, or function, correctly” ( 63 ). According to the NIH, then, an organ that is not functioning correctly is not sufficient for the condition to be labeled a disease.

On this point, Temblay and Doucet ( 64 ) wrote, “Obesity facilitates the maintenance of body homeostasis probably because of an increased hormonal gradient which favours the regulation of energy balance, to give but one example. The regulation potential of excess body fat is particularly apparent in the reduced-obese state where a reduction of energy expenditure, fat oxidation and some immune system markers, as well as an increase in appetite, stress vulnerability and circulating and adipose tissue organochlorines, have been observed. These constitute another category of risk factors which can certainly favour the accumulation of body fat to reestablish body homeostasis on other fronts. Under such conditions, obesity is perceived by the physiologist as a necessary biological adaptation rather than a disease.” In contrast, others argue that, although adiposity might be protective in some cases, this does not necessarily support the conclusion that obesity is therefore homeostatic or beneficial overall. Extra fat might protect against toxins or offer some beneficial effects yet simultaneously have deleterious effects that outweigh the benefits. Similarly, if there are mechanisms that promote fat deposition as a defense against environmental toxins, then those toxins might be seen as etiologic mechanisms for obesity. Homeostatic mechanisms are not always clinically good or desirable, especially in environments that are not closely aligned with those in which the species evolved.

A further line of argument along evolutionary lines considers that the key organ in obesity is adipose tissue and a purpose of adipose tissue is to store excess available energy as triglyceride for future use. When adipose hypertrophy occurs beyond some point and new adipocytes cannot be proliferated, adipose tissue may no longer effectively serve this function and metabolic aberrations may result ( 65 ). Although this may be true, it is not likely that that this is the sole or primary means by which obesity adversely affects health, function, and longevity. Finally, although storing triglyceride is one function of adipose tissue, it is certainly not the only function.

Thus, the evolutionary approach permits an interesting array of perspectives and does not offer a clear path by which obesity may be classified as a disease. De Vries ( 66 ) also considered these biostatistical and evolutionary definitions and came to the same conclusion that we do.

We now consider the approach of comparing the known facts about obesity to the dictionary-based definitions offered by Heshka and Allison ( 39 ), Conway and Rene ( 41 ), Downey ( 40 ), and the AMA ( 44 ). Referring to their four key elements in common definitions of disease, Heshka and Allison wrote that there should be little disagreement that obesity satisfies the first two elements: an excess accumulation of fat can certainly be thought of as a condition of the body and the list of potential causes is so extensive that the causes of obesity must surely be found there. However, they expressed concerns about the third element because, as we offered above when discussing key facts about obesity, no signs inevitably characterize the condition of obesity other than excess adiposity, which is the definition of obesity. Similarly, the AMA ( 44 ) noted that obesity failed to satisfy what it listed as the second criterion of a disease: characteristic signs and symptoms ( Figure 1 ). Specifically, the AMA stated, “Three criteria must be met. … The second criterion of disease, characteristics signs or symptoms, is not fully met by obesity. There are no specific symptoms of obesity and the only sign is a greater weight and an excessively large appearance.” The AMA explicitly states that obesity is not a disease. Given that the organization asserts that three criteria must be met, explicitly states that one of the three is not met, and strongly questions the third, the conclusion from its point of view is obvious. In contrast, Downey ( 40 ), referring to Stedman's second definition of a disease—i.e., “ identifiable group of signs and symptoms ” (emphasis added)—wrote, “Obesity clearly meets all 3 criteria, not just 2. … The signs and symptoms of obesity include an excess accumulation of adipose tissue and are likely to include insulin resistance, increased glucose, elevated cholesterol and triglyceride levels, decreased levels of high-density lipoprotein and norepinephrine, and alterations in the activity of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.”

There are other differences between the definitions used by Heshka and Allison and the AMA and that used by Downey. Downey requires that two of three criteria be met, whereas Heshka and Allison and the AMA require all criteria to be met, an increase in the burden of proof. Heshka and Allison's requirements seemed to be the proper distillation of the many definitions they reviewed. The reasons for the AMA's choice are unknown to us, but we may speculate that they are similar. Additionally, only as implied by the language of their fourth criterion does the definition used by Heshka and Allison refer to resultant mortality or morbidity, whereas Downey's definition does so more explicitly. Curiously, Oliver ( 42 ) also relied on Stedman's definition but came to the conclusion opposite from that of Downey ( 40 ) and Conway and Rene ( 41 ). Oliver wrote, “Even Stedman's Medical Dictionary does not call obesity a disease, it is simply ‘excess subcutaneous fat in proportion to lean body mass' or, at worst, ‘a public health problem.’”

How is it that these authors disagree on the fundamental issue of whether obesity has an identifiable group of signs and symptoms, characteristic signs and symptoms, or a characteristic, identifiable, marked, group of symptoms or signs? Key issues seem to be the inclusion or interpretation of words such as “characteristic” and the eschewing or lack thereof of tautological reasoning.

Both Heshka and Allison ( 39 ) and the AMA ( 44 ) use the word “characteristic” and interpret it to imply a certain degree of inevitability. Thus, although there is no dispute that, as Downey ( 40 ) wrote, the adverse effects of obesity are “ likely [emphasis added] to include insulin resistance, increased glucose,” as Downey's use of the word “likely” implies and as stated earlier in the key facts about obesity, these are only likely outcomes of obesity, not inevitabilities. Some might question whether an entity must have characteristic signs to be considered a disease and note that tuberculosis, for example, is usually considered a disease and has characteristic signs of bloody cough and fever, yet this condition—sometimes referred to as “the great pretender”—can alternatively present as back pain, fever without respiratory symptoms, adrenal crisis, and headache, and in many other noncharacteristic ways. This example reinforces the notion that no existing definition of disease seems entirely satisfactory to capture entities generally accepted as disease and to exclude entities not accepted as diseases.

An example of tautological reasoning is the listing by Downey ( 40 ) of excess accumulation of adipose tissue among the signs and symptoms of obesity. Heshka and Allison ( 39 ) see this as a trivial truth because it is part of the definition of obesity. To return to the abstract version of “does a class of entities A rightly belong as a subset to the larger class of entities denoted B?,” if a criterion for membership in class B is having a characteristic sign and we admit that a sufficient characteristic sign is that an entity has been labeled as being in another particular class (e.g., class A), then all identifiable classes of entities will meet this criterion and it ceases to have any discriminating meaning and becomes superfluous. If we are to take seriously the idea that dictionaries are authoritative sources on definitions of disease, then we need to assume that these definitions are meaningful and therefore do not contain superfluous elements. Tautological interpretation that makes elements superfluous thereby vitiates the scientific approach to evaluating obesity as a disease.

We turn to the fourth criterion of Heshka and Allison ( 39 ) (i.e., deviating from normal structure or function) and the third criterion listed by the AMA ( 44 ) (resulting in harm or morbidity to the entity affected). Heshka and Allison wrote, “The deviations specified range from simple deviation from normality, to impairment, interruption or cessation of vital functions. Moreover, what is meant by deviation from normality is not clear—it can imply undesirable variation or simple statistical rarity.” Tremblay and Doucet ( 64 ) make clear that it is not obvious that obesity can be uniformly described as an impairment in function, and, as we noted in the key facts about obesity, obesity is only associated with various adverse events and limitations in probability. The AMA ( 44 ) arrives at essentially the same conclusion. In contrast, the definition used by Downey ( 40 ) and Conway and Rene ( 41 ) does not require that such a criterion be met. According to this approach, for example, stroke might not considered a disease or illness because it does not uniformly result in an impairment of function and its effects range from subclinical ones (normality) to massive impairment and death. This further reinforces the point that existing dictionary definitions of disease seem ill suited to capturing entities that society clearly recognizes as disease (and also to excluding things clearly not recognized as diseases) and the subsequent conclusion that entities do not come to be classified or not classified as disease on the basis of comparing facts known about the entities with accepted defining criteria of diseases.

Thus, an analysis of attempted applications of the scientific approach to determining whether obesity is rightly labeled a disease reveals that differences in conclusions do not stem from disagreements about the facts regarding obesity but rather from whether those facts justify declaring obesity a disease on definitional grounds because of disagreement about the precise definition of “disease” and how that definition should be legitimately applied.

Is the question ill posed?

A question can be said to be ill posed if it is insensible and will be insensible if its sensibility depends on premises that are not true. Asking and answering the question “is obesity a disease?” is predicated on the premise that there is a clear concept of disease. As shown above, we do not struggle with answering this question because of disagreements about facts regarding obesity; we struggle because of a lack of clarity and consensus as to the definition of disease ( 57 ). The struggle is not solved by simply adopting the definitions and interpretive approach used by Downey ( 40 ) and Conway and Rene ( 41 ) on the one hand or by Heshka and Allison ( 39 ) and the AMA ( 44 ) on the other hand. Strict application of Downey's definition and approach would result in the labeling of any characteristic or habit that causes increased risk of morbidity or mortality as a disease, including being male, being over age 40, riding a motorcycle without a helmet, not sleeping 6–8 hours per day, and not regularly consuming moderate amounts of alcohol. All of these are associated with increased morbidity and/or mortality (i.e., are morbid entities), all have causes (i.e., etiologic agents), and all have characteristic signs (especially if one admits tautological identification of such signs), and the first two have characteristic anatomic alterations. Inclusion of such entities in the category of diseases seems absurd. (In some of these examples the characteristic sign would simply be a behavior, but if one rules this out as a legitimate qualifier, then almost all forms of mental illness would not qualify as disease.) Similarly, strict application of the approach used by the AMA and Heshka and Allison might exclude many entities from the category of disease that society at large seems to have agreed to label as diseases, including hypertension, alcoholism, and many psychological disorders. This in no way implies that hypertension, alcoholism, and many psychological disorders should not be considered diseases but rather that available definitions of disease are wanting and do not in practice serve as the foundation for determining which entities come to be considered diseases.

The idea that disease is not a crisply defined category that admits strict scientific or empirical verification of an entity's eligibility for the category was nicely articulated by Richard Levinson, the associate executive director of the American Public Health Association. “During my lifespan,” he noted, “the infectious disease of children were regarded as part of the normal process of growing up. We now regard them as totally avoidable and eminently preventable, and we consider, those of us who have been in public health, we consider it a stain on our escutcheon if a single child shows up in our jurisdiction with one of these illnesses. This was not true for centuries and eons. So this definition is highly fluid and we must be aware of it, and what is a natural state today may not be regarded as a natural state in the near future.” He added, “I think that it is absolutely clear that there are not two categories in this world, disease and not disease, or disease and natural state. This is a continuity between the two, and…the boundaries are, at best, arbitrary” ( 59 ). This point is further reinforced by the FDA's exclusion of “diseases resulting from essential nutrient deficiencies” from its definition of disease for the purposes of enforcing DSHEA ( 67 ). By the agency's own language, some of the things it excludes from the category of disease are diseases, implying that the FDA considers that something may properly be labeled a disease in one context and not in another.

The fact that a single definition and its use cannot be agreed on and that adoption of initially seemingly reasonable definitions may lead to absurd outcomes if rigorously applied, suggests that as a community we do not have precise well-accepted definitions of disease that can be applied in a scientific manner to determine whether something is a disease. Hence, if there is no clear precise definition of disease, it makes no sense, from a strictly scientific point of view, to ask whether obesity is a disease.

The scientific approach would be well suited to answering the question “is obesity a disease?” rather than “should we consider obesity a disease?” were the former question answerable. However, we believe the question is ill posed and does not admit an answer. This is not because of a lack of agreement or understanding about obesity but rather because of the lack of a clear, specific, widely accepted, and scientifically applicable definition of a disease.

Arguments and Evidence: the Forensic Approach

By a forensic approach, we mean looking to the public statements of authoritative bodies as evidence for the validity of a proposition. Some authors (e.g., ref. 40 ) and some legal proceedings (e.g., ref. 68 ) have relied heavily on the forensic approach to determine whether obesity is rightly considered a disease. Application of the approach involves two simple steps: identifying an authoritative body and determining its stated position on whether obesity is or should be considered a disease. Although these steps are conceptually simple, there are practical challenges and fundamental questions as to the worth of the forensic approach.

The importance of distinguishing offhand statements from official declarations

In adopting the forensic approach, it is important to distinguish casual statements from official positions. For example, if the president of the United States were to state in a speech that despite the tribulations of today, the sun will rise tomorrow, we would not take seriously a claim that this demonstrated that the federal government's official position is that the sun moves relative to the earth. So, too, if an excerpt from a book offered on the website of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) says, “Obesity is not a disease but a prominent risk factor for many diseases” ( 69 ), this should not be assumed to be the ADA's official position. On the other hand, some statements are clearly meant to be official positions; e.g., see the statement by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in Appendix 2. These examples are exceptionally clear. In many other cases, however, the extent to which a statement is the opinion of a spokesperson, the opinion of the larger body, an official declaration of a position, or an offhand remark is ambiguous. Readers should consider this in weighing the quotations provided.

A summary of what has been said by authoritative bodies

We summarize statements by authoritative bodies in Appendix 2. Many statements may be construed to imply that the organizations take the position that obesity is a disease. Sources of such statements include the National Academy of Sciences, the NIH, the FDA, the former US Surgeon General, the World Health Organization, the American Association for Clinical Endocrinology/American College of Endocrinology, the American Gastroenterological Association, and an expert committee convened by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. At least one agency, the CMS, has made a formal statement that leaves little doubt that they take no formal position on the question. At least one advocacy group (the International Size Acceptance Association) has made a clear statement that it does not consider obesity a disease. At least two organizations (the AMA and the Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre) have made multiple statements that are seemingly contradictory.

Problems with the forensic approach

As addressed above, it is difficult to distinguish between offhand (or well-thought-out) statements by an employee or affiliate of an organization and the organization's official position (if it has one). Determining which bodies are appropriately judged to be authoritative is challenging. We suspect that not everyone would agree that all the groups represented in Appendix 2 are indeed authoritative bodies, but how exactly do we make this distinction?

Apparently authoritative bodies may (and do) disagree with one another. How, then, do we reach a decision if we are basing a decision on the opinions of such bodies? If we were to weigh the number of bodies that offer the opinion that obesity is a disease against the number that maintain that obesity is not a disease, not only would we be engaging in the logical fallacy argumentum ad numerum , but we would likely be ignoring a plausibly potent form of selection bias. Specifically, just as post offices do not post least-wanted posters of people widely believed to be guilty of nothing, some members of our panel intuitively believe that medical, scientific, and academic agencies and experts do not typically take the time to write articles stating that certain entities are not diseases even if they believe that to be the case.

Relying on the opinions of authoritative bodies risks reifying the political status quo and potentially makes progress the slave to the courage and perspicacity (or lack thereof) of large and often bureaucratic organizations. Some authoritative bodies (e.g., the US Congress, the Supreme Court, and the United Nations) have not spoken at all on the subject. Should their silence be weighed? Most importantly, relying on the opinions of authoritative bodies that have the power to make laws is appropriate for determining which behaviors are lawful, but is it appropriate for determining which conclusions are reasonable? Clearly the answer must be “no.” We can judge the reasonableness of a conclusion only by examining the reasoning supporting that conclusion regardless of who offered the opinion. In this regard, it is noteworthy that none of the statements listed in Appendix 2 was accompanied by thorough and rigorous explication—if any explication at all—of the reasoning underlying the statements.

First, consideration of the statements in Appendix 2 makes apparent that there is a lack of consensus among bodies that some might consider authoritative as to whether obesity is rightly called a disease, although there is a clear and strong majority leaning in this direction. Second, and far more important, the opinions of authoritative bodies tell us, at most, what is lawful, consistent with mainstream opinions, or likely to be supported by others. Such opinions, even if clear and consistent, are insufficient to tell us what is true or what is right. Our panel strongly endorsed the position that there can be no higher authority than reason. Hence, the forensic approach cannot help us determine whether obesity is a disease or whether obesity should be considered a disease.

Arguments and Evidence: the Utilitarian Approach

Given that no clear agreed-on definition of disease that has precise and assessable criteria can be articulated, how are things judged to be diseases? It seems that conditions that produce adverse health outcomes come to be considered diseases as the result of a social process when it is assessed to be beneficial to the greater good that they be so judged. Such decisions about likely benefit to the greater good are utilitarian judgments that may take empirical input but must also assume certain values. We examine the likely outcomes of considering obesity a disease and try to make clear the empirical input and value judgments being made. Necessarily, our comments concerning future effects must be speculative, and we offer them with humility as to our ability to forecast the future. In this light we are mindful of the principle of medicine that, if one can do nothing else, one should at least do no harm. We note also that the utilitarian argument in favor of labeling obesity a disease is not that this benefits some small special-interest group such as obesity researchers or treatment providers. Rather, the argument is that the disease label might have broad effects for a large portion of society, for the greater good.

Finally, we note that the utilitarian argument should not be confused with the argument from consequences, which is a fallacious argument for the truth of a proposition on the basis that belief in the truth of the proposition has benefits. In contrast, a utilitarian argument is not fallacious when it concerns the benefit of courses of action as opposed to the truth of propositions. For this reason the utilitarian argument can address the question “should obesity be declared a disease?” as opposed to “is obesity a disease?”

Anticipated effects of labeling obesity a disease

Effects on public understanding of obesity and social stigma . The current understanding of obesity by the public at large consists mainly of two positions. One position equates obesity with poor character, lack of self-control, laziness, and gluttony. It views obesity as the result of an individual's choice of behavior, like smoking or driving without a seatbelt, that has relatively little effect on others—a lifestyle choice. The other position sees obesity as a risk factor or a stage on the path to a real disease such as heart disease or diabetes. In this view, a reduction in obesity is seen as useful in reducing the risk of other diseases. However, reduction in body weight for its own sake is often associated with vanity or seen as a cosmetic issue. A third viewpoint is that obesity is a genetically determined trait (evidence clearly indicates that both genetic and environmental factors contribute to obesity), not very different from hair or eye color, and not a disease.

Viewing obesity as a disease may—depending on the breadth and depth of future public knowledge—affect these prevailing attitudes. The view of obesity as a lifestyle choice will be less widespread if the public begins to appreciate that it results from a combination of genetic predisposition, behavioral factors, and environmental influences, much like other diseases. By bringing the genetic and physiological influences more clearly into focus, the condemnation of individuals who cannot maintain a normal weight may be diminished. This may reduce the stigma and resulting discrimination experienced by persons with obesity.

On the other hand, labeling obesity a disease may further stigmatize some obese individuals who would now be marked as having a disease whose existence is visually detectable. Although the panel members acknowledged the reasonableness of this conjecture, they felt that using the reasoning that elements of society will further discriminate against obese people if obesity is called a disease does not seem a good justification for refraining from categorizing obesity as a disease. As with other entities labeled diseases, one may be able to combat such unjust stigmatization and any attendant discrimination more effectively and aggressively once the disease label has been assigned openly. If society does declare that obesity is a disease, we are then obligated to ensure that it is treated as other diseases are and that those afflicted are afforded whatever protection the label can offer, without the stigma.

Those who view obesity as a lifestyle choice are concerned that its acceptance as a disease would be used as an excuse for individuals to stop trying to manage their weight and merely accept their weight as inevitable or immutable. However, the likelihood of this may be offset by the perception that obesity is a disease that results in premature death, sickness, and disability. One can conjecture that individuals who adopt this view would be expected to take their weight more seriously, cease engaging in dubious and episodic therapies, and take a more aggressive approach.

The other widely held public position—that obesity as a risk factor—is more problematic. This view is well supported by numerous association and observational studies and backed, in many but not all cases, by probable mechanisms of action. Although future studies may elucidate the relationships between obesity and its comorbid conditions, it appears clear that obesity is an independent risk factor for several fatal and disabling diseases. The difference that viewing obesity as a disease may make is one of emphasis. Risk factors, in addition to obesity, generally include age, gender, level of physical activity, smoking, and risk-taking behavior. The National Cancer Institute ( 70 ) defines a risk factor as “something that may increase the chance of developing a disease. Some examples of risk factors for cancer include age, a family history of certain cancers, use of tobacco products, certain eating habits, obesity, lack of exercise, exposure to radiation or other cancer-causing agents, and certain genetic changes.” It should be noted that there is no inherent contradiction in something's being both a disease and a risk factor. However, the resources of the US health-care system are directed less to risk factors than to the diseases such risk factors contribute to (unless one considers the risk factors as both risk factors and diseases, such as hypertension and diabetes, which get considerable attention). For this reason, diseases receive substantially more research funding than risk factors. Treatment of diseases is more often covered by health insurance than is the amelioration of risk factors. In other words, diseases are more in the mainstream of US health care than are risk factors. Risk factors are assigned to preventive health care, which historically receives fewer resources than disease treatment.

Because we care about the welfare and health of all people, including obese persons, we believe that additional resources to help ameliorate the suffering induced by obesity are desirable and we unabashedly make that view clear. This does not mean that resources should be expended without considering the safety and efficacy of the programs to which they are allocated, nor does it mean that they should be expended without considering other competing priorities, but only that the door should be opened to fair and serious consideration of such increases in resources for alleviating obesity.

Effects on prevention programs . Rising rates of childhood obesity continue to be a significant health and economic concern. To stem this increase will likely require early and sustained interventions that promote an active lifestyle and healthy eating. It seems likely that categorizing obesity as a disease would have a positive influence on such programs. It is even possible that it might give such programs greater urgency.

For employers, categorizing obesity as a disease might have positive or negative outcomes, depending on one's point of view. If obesity were considered a disease, it is possible that employers would be required to offer obesity treatments, including medications and surgical procedures, with the same cost-sharing arrangements that they offer for other services. Although this might allow lower-cost access to these procedures for obese individuals, it would ultimately increase costs for the employer. Some employers might respond by raising premiums or, as some small employers have done, dropping coverage altogether. It is also possible that employers would be increasingly hesitant to hire obese workers, who would now be more likely to take advantage of covered services. However, if obesity were declared a disease, it is possible that employers would be barred from discriminating on the basis of weight by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Currently there is little legislation that explicitly prohibits weight discrimination ( 10 , 71 ).

Another issue with declaring obesity a disease concerns the ability to use weight as a performance metric. For example, firms are increasingly offering financial incentives or reduced insurance premiums to individuals who move toward or maintain an ideal weight. There is evidence that these programs may be effective ( 72 ). However, if obesity were declared a disease, it might no longer be legal to tie incentives to measures of obesity, including weight or BMI. It is even possible that employers would face additional constraints on their ability to collect data on the body weight or BMI of employees, making these potentially beneficial programs even more challenging.

Depending on one's point of view, declaring obesity a disease could mean protection of the privacy of individuals with obesity and a leveling of the playing field for obesity-related medical treatment or unnecessary inhibition of corporate wellness programs. On balance, the panel felt that the greater urgency conveyed by the disease label and the prevention programs that this might spur would substantially outweigh any detrimental effects on the implementation of such programs.

Effects on treatment . Categorization of obesity as a disease by the federal government and the medical establishment could have profound effects on treatment. In both the government and the medical establishment, obesity seems to be underestimated as a condition meriting treatment and perhaps therefore is thought to be less entitled to the funding and consideration given to similar conditions that are more widely recognized as diseases. In general, the costs of medical obesity treatment and drugs for obesity are not covered by either government programs or private insurance companies. Many obese individuals are desperate for treatment—the number of people who self-treat and those treated by commercial programs is larger than the number currently treated by the medical establishment. If obesity were considered a disease and entitled to the same considerations given to other diseases, treatment paradigms would change fundamentally. Physicians and other health professionals currently have little incentive to treat obesity because the financial remuneration is lacking or insufficient, especially in light of the additional time and resources necessary for adequate treatment. If treatment were covered, more physicians would be likely to engage patients in treatment protocols. The FDA would come under more pressure to approve obesity drugs, and physicians would be more likely to use obesity drugs in treatment. Diseases are often viewed as alterations of normal biochemistry, and for many other diseases these alterations are treated with drugs (in addition to other measures) because drugs change biochemistry. There likely would be an increased attention to development of new and better obesity drugs by pharmaceutical companies but also a new willingness of physicians to try obesity drugs alone or in combinations, as is done for other diseases.

The FDA guidances for approval of obesity drugs might well be altered to give less importance to metabolic biomarkers (blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol) and more to the loss of adipose tissue itself or particular depots of adipose tissue that are especially noxious in excess. This would be based on the understanding that adipose tissue is not inert; it secretes many substances that travel through the bloodstream to various organs and tissues, such as leptin, resistin, adiponectin, sex hormones, angiotensin, tumor necrosis factor-α, and interleukin-6 ( 27 , 47 , 73 , 74 ). The hormones and other substances secreted by adipose tissue are known to have profound, and usually deleterious, effects on many physiological functions.

Current medical education pays minimal attention to the problem of obesity, and even that is geared to the concept of obesity as a lifestyle choice rather than a physiological problem. If obesity were considered a disease, additional attention would need to be given to it and the attitudes of physicians would change. With this increased attention, medical treatment options, especially drug treatment, likely would become more aggressive. Medical treatment and obesity surgery would be given more attention by physicians, health administrators, insurance companies, and employers, resulting in greater access by patients to higher-quality care.

Effects on insurance reimbursement . In most health insurance plans, payments are made for the reasonable and necessary treatment of accidents or illnesses. Obesity has been viewed by the health insurance industry as a lifestyle issue or as a preventive health issue. In either case, there is little or no reimbursement of expenses for lifestyle counseling or preventive health care compared with that for diseases. Were obesity to be widely viewed as a disease, it is likely that insurers would feel greater pressure to remove the exclusion of obesity in their health-care plans. Not all obstacles to reimbursement would be removed; insurers would still question treatment effectiveness, there would still be limitations on coverage of pre-existing conditions, and employers might seek to raise contributions to health-care plans by employees who are overweight or obese. These issues would certainly need monitoring and involvement. However, it is difficult to see a negative effect in terms of health insurance reimbursement.

Effects on medical education . Medical education today is an example of the relatively short shrift given to preventive medicine in contrast to disease treatment. Lifestyle modification is rarely taught to medical students, whether it be for smoking, drug abuse, alcoholism, or obesity. Obesity itself is usually the subject of very limited, often optional presentations. Although attention to obesity in medical school education appears to have increased somewhat in recent years, there is a strong belief that further increases are warranted ( 75 , 76 ). This belief contributes to the attitudes of some physicians that they are untrained in the treatment or prevention of obesity and lack the skills necessary to advise their overweight and obese patients. It is reasonable to speculate that if obesity were widely seen as a disease, it is likely that there would be an increase in the attention it receives as part of physician education and a consequent positive effect on patient care.

Effects on consumer protection . As mentioned above, the FDA has undertaken an extensive rule-making process regarding the definition of disease and whether obesity meets that definition for purposes of enforcing the DSHEA. Under current regulations, manufacturers of dietary supplements are barred from making claims that their products treat obesity because such claims are associated with disease. On the other hand, they can claim that a product causes weight loss or eliminates the risk of weight gain because such claims are structure/function claims. A position by TOS that obesity is a disease is unlikely to change this, with one caveat—although we have not herein defined obesity as a BMI of 30 or greater, the FDA has used this definition to distinguish obesity from overweight. This difference might be used to persuade the FDA to change its definition of obesity or to expand the current definition using a BMI with a lower cutoff. However, these outcomes are speculative. In summary, the FDA already treats obesity as a disease for purposes of the DSHEA, so this position statement is unlikely to change the status quo.

Effects on discrimination prevention via legal means . Labeling obesity a disease might enhance society's ability to use legal means to protect obese persons from unjust discrimination. However, the issues surrounding this are complex and vary from context to context ( 77 ). On balance, the panel did not feel it has sufficient information to draw a strong conclusion about the extent to which the disease label would enhance or encumber society's ability to use legal means to protect obese persons from unjust discrimination.

Effects on credibility of obesity field and experts . Bleich et al. ( 78 ) reinforce the intuitive notion that if obesity experts wish to be helpful to the general community, it will be important to build and retain the trust of that community. Therefore, we should consider the extent to which labeling obesity a disease will enhance or detract from the long-term credibility of obesity experts. Here there are likely to be both positive and negative effects.

On the negative side, every year several papers are published that might be termed deconstructionist obesity papers (for a recent example, see ref. 79 ). These are academic counterparts to the general public's occasional discomfort and distrust of the messages and messengers of the mainstream obesity research and treatment community. Deconstructionist obesity papers vary greatly, but two ideas espoused in many are that the ill effects of obesity have been exaggerated and that mainstream obesity experts offer the opinion that obesity is harmful and should be labeled a disease because they have financial conflicts of interest that motivate them to voice such opinions. One utilitarian consideration in choosing to label obesity a disease is that it may fuel this type of mistrustful thinking and thereby reduce the overall ability of obesity experts and clinicians to be helpful. Because of this, we believe it is important that obesity experts not cloak their utilitarian views on obesity as a disease as purely objective scientific determinations because doing so is disingenuous and likely to increase mistrust.

On the positive side, many clinicians are reluctant to become seriously involved in the treatment of obesity for fear of being seen as engaged in at best a trivial and at worst an unscrupulous medical practice. Were obesity ultimately accepted as a disease, it would likely do much in the long run to quell such fears and result in an increase in practitioners willing to engage in obesity treatment and in a greater trust of those practitioners.

In this area, the positive effects are likely to be greater and more long lasting than the negative effects. Thus, the net effect on the credibility of obesity experts and practitioners is likely to be positive in the long term.

Limitations of the utilitarian approach

Although we believe that the utilitarian approach is the most sound approach to take to this issue, it is not without limitations that must be acknowledged.

Utilities can change over time . Although an act may be judged to have largely positive utility, this may change as new information becomes available, values change with cultural shifts, or the environment changes. For example, homosexuality was once seen to be a disease, but it no longer is, because of changing utilities ( 80 ). Nevertheless, although utilities may change in the future, we must act on the utilities before us today, while leaving ourselves open to modifying our acts in the future.

There is subjectivity in utilities . There is no denying that there is subjectivity in values that in turn leads to subjectivity in utilities. We cannot prove, for example, that alleviating suffering is desirable, but we choose it as a value without apology. When we have chosen this and other values, the utilitarian analysis can proceed with reasonable objectivity.

Actions will almost certainly have unforeseeable effects . We tried to describe above the major effects that we anticipate labeling obesity a disease will have. However, we fully acknowledge that we cannot anticipate or delineate all effects, and some unforeseen effects will be positive and some will be negative. This implies to us that we need to monitor the results of our actions in the future, not that we should not take action in the absence of perfect (and therefore unattainable) knowledge.

Necessarily, our utilitarian analysis is speculative. It is difficult to fully foresee complex effects over long periods of time. Because there are few data and precedents, we must enter these waters with humility about to our ability to forecast the future. On balance, though, it seems that considering obesity a disease is likely to have far more positive than negative consequences and benefit the greater good by soliciting more resources into research, prevention, and treatment of obesity; by encouraging more high-quality caring professionals to view treating the obese patient as a vocation worthy of effort and respect; and by reducing the stigma and discrimination heaped upon many obese persons.

Acknowledgment

We are grateful to Harold Kincaid for his thought-provoking discussion on this topic. This effort was supported by TOS's general operating budget.

(See Appendix 3 for documents relating to this topic that were reviewed but not cited in text.)

TOS and members of the writing group have accepted funds from multiple food, pharmaceutical, and other companies with interests in obesity.

APPENDIX 1: Invalid Arguments Pertaining to Whether Obesity is a Disease

The article describes several major arguments regarding the question of whether obesity should be considered a disease. Here we list some of the other arguments that have been used to address this issue. Although we judge them to be patently invalid, we mention them because of their frequent occurrence.

APPENDIX 2: Statements Made by Authoritative Bodies Regarding Obesity as a Disease

1. The National Academy of Sciences, established by an act of Congress in 1863, is composed of four organizations. One, the Institute of Medicine, created the Food and Nutrition Board. In 1995, the Board's Committee to Develop Criteria for Evaluating the Outcomes of Approaches to Prevent and Treat Obesity published a report, Weighing the Options ( 81 ). The report states, “These figures [regarding the prevalence of obesity] point to the fact that obesity is one of the most pervasive public health problems in this country, a complex, multifactorial disease…Obesity is a remarkable disease in terms of the effort required by an individual for its management and the extent of discrimination its victims suffer.”

2. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) ( 82 ) wrote, “CMS opened this NCD [national coverage determination] to clarify the confusion resulting from statements in the current Coverage Issues Manual that indicated that obesity is not an illness. Because the Coverage Issue Manual is intended to address the coverage of particular care and services, rather than the definition of illness, we do not believe it is appropriate for the manual to address this issues. Furthermore, our review of current literature indicates that there is no general agreement on the classification of obesity as an illness. For purposes of the Coverage Issues Manual, the critical issue is not the classification of obesity but whether particular items or services are reasonable and necessary.” It is clear that the CMS was issuing a deliberate statement to clarify its position, which is that it is not making a determination as to whether obesity is an illness and, presumably, whether obesity is a disease.

3. According to clinical guidelines produced by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), “Obesity is a complex multifactorial chronic disease developing from interactive influences of numerous factors” ( 5 ).

4. An earlier statement following an NIH consensus conference said, “Current knowledge of human obesity has progressed beyond the simple generalizations of the past.…this disease in man is complex and deeply rooted in biologic systems” ( 83 ). It is important to note, however, that although consensus conferences are sponsored by the NIH, the reports are independent of NIH staff input or review. This is thus a position of attendees at an NIH-sponsored conference, not of the NIH per se.

5. The World Health Organization ( 84 ) stated, “Obesity is a chronic disease, prevalent in both developed and developing countries, and affecting children as well as adults.”

6. The Surgeon General of the United States, David M. Satcher, MD, speaking at an American Obesity Association conference on 15 September 1999, said, “If we don't get a handle on the risk factors in childhood, including being able to deal with the disease of obesity, then we have to look forward to a future in which there are going to be more and more people suffering from diabetes and hypertension and various forms of cardiovascular diseases” ( 85 ).

7. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stated quite clearly that it considered obesity to be a disease in its Regulations on Statements Made for Dietary Supplements Concerning the Effect of the Product on the Structure or Function of the Body; Final Rule ( 61 ): “FDA agrees with these comments that obesity is a disease.” According to the FDA, obesity is a disease and the state of being overweight but not obese is not a disease.

8. The Federal Trade Commission, which has policed commercial weight-loss practices, organized the Partnership for Healthy Weight Management. Members of the partnership agreed to comply with the Voluntary Guidelines for Providers of Weight Loss Products or Services, which refer to obesity as “a serious, chronic disease” ( 86 ). The partnership comprised representatives of the following academic, government, commercial, and advocacy organizations: the American Dietetic Association, the American Obesity Association, the American Society for Clinical Nutrition, the American Society of Bariatric Physicians, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Comprehensive Weight Control, the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Department of Nutrition Sciences, the NIH's Division of Nutrition Research Coordination, the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection, George Washington University's Obesity Management Program, Health Management Resources, Jenny Craig, Inc., Knoll Pharmaceuticals, Lindora Medical Clinics, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's Division of Cardiovascular Health and Nutrition, the Medical University of South Carolina's Weight Management Center, the NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the New York Obesity Research Center, the North American Association for the Study of Obesity, Novartis Nutrition Corporation, Shape Up America!, the Slim-Fast Foods Company, Tanita Corporation of America, St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital's Nutrition and Weight Management Center, the University of Colorado Center for Human Nutrition, the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, and Weight Watchers International, Inc.

9. Judy Dausch ( 87 ), senior manager for regulatory affairs at the American Dietetic Association, declared, “Obesity is a disease.” She offers no rationale but suggests, “Until we establish a national consensus that obesity is a disease and must be treated as such, efforts to confront and curb this epidemic will be severely compromised.”

10. “The Maternal and Child Health Bureau, Health Resources and Services Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services convened a committee of pediatric obesity experts to develop the recommendations…for physicians, nurse practitioners, and nutritionists to guide the evaluation and treatment of overweight children and adolescents.” The committee wrote, “Obesity in children and adolescents represents one of the most frustrating and difficult diseases to treat…Obesity represents a chronic disease.… Obesity is a chronic disease requiring lifelong attention” ( 88 ).

11. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9-CM) is based on the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases, ninth revision (ICD-9) ( 89 ). ICD-9-CM is the official system for assigning codes to diagnoses and procedures associated with hospital utilization in the United States; the National Center for Health Statistics and the CMS is responsible for overseeing all changes and modifications. It lists “Obesity and other hyperalimentation” as #278.0 in the section “Endocrine, Nutritional, Metabolic and Immunity Diseases.” The ICD-9-CM is recommended for use in all clinical settings but is required for reporting diagnoses and diseases to all US Public Health Service and Health Care Financing Administration programs. Note that the full name of ICD-10, the 10th edition, is the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (emphasis added); it includes conditions and situations that are not diseases but represent risk factors to health. ICD-10 is treated as an addendum to ICD-9, which remains the primary coding vehicle. ICD-10CM has several codes for obesity, including E65, localized adiposity; E60, obesity due to excess calories; E66.1, drug-induced obesity; E66.2, extreme obesity with alveolar hypoventilation; and E66.8, other obesity. The ICD is considered by many the definitive international classification of diseases and related health conditions. It is noteworthy that ICD-10CM does not distinguish between diseases in one section and related health conditions in another ( 90 ).

12. The American Association of Clinical Endocrinology/American College of Endocrinology Position Statement on the Prevention, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Obesity (1998 Revision) ( 91 ) says, “The objectives of this position paper are as follows: 1. Document that obesity is a disease.”

13. The American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), in the first sentence of its Technical Review on Obesity ( 92 ), states, “Obesity is a chronic and stigmatizing disease that has become a major health problem in most industrialized countries because of its high prevalence, causal relationship with serious medical illnesses, and economic impact.” The statement was approved by the AGA's Clinical Practice Committee and the Governing Board.

14. Obesity is listed in the Professional Guide to Diseases , 6th edition ( 93 ).

15. A Veterans Administration solicitation of applications contained this statement: “VA RR&D realizes that obesity is a complex disease process” ( 94 ).

16. A press release from the American Heart Association quoted the vice chairman of the Nutrition Committee, Robert H. Eckel, MD, as saying, “Obesity itself has become a life-long disease, not a cosmetic issue, nor a moral judgment—and it is becoming a dangerous epidemic.” Later he changed his view, offering that obesity is only a disorder and not a disease ( 95 ), and the organization's subsequent official position statement on obesity refers to obesity only as a risk factor for disease ( 16 ).

17. The American Association of Family Physicians ( 96 ) recognizes obesity as a disease.

18. The American Society of Bariatric Physicians wrote that obesity has been “recognized since 1985 as a chronic disease” ( 97 ).

19. The American Obesity Association and Shape Up America! Guidance on the Treatment of Adult Obesity states, “Obesity is a disease afflicting millions of Americans and causing a great deal of pain and suffering” ( 98 ).

20. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, in a formal position statement on the use of pharmacotherapy for obesity treatment, wrote, “Obesity is a chronic disease that may require pharmacologic treatment” ( 99 ).

21. At least one advocacy organization, the International Size Acceptance Association, has issued an explicit and formal statement that obesity is not a disease ( 100 , 101 ).

22. Another advocacy organization, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, seems to believe that obesity is not a disease ( 102 ). Although it is not clear whether there is a formal statement to that effect, the writings of many of the organization's leaders, including executive director Sally Smith, make this perspective clear. For example, Smith wrote, “Researchers are positioning obesity next to hypertension, as a chronic disease requiring lifelong treatment, even though there is no evidence that obesity significantly decreases longevity” ( 103 ).

23. The American Medical Association (AMA) has seemingly offered two opposing statements. The video it sponsored ( 44 ) clearly indicates that obesity does not meet the organization's criteria for a disease. However, a resolution on this matter states that the AMA “will collaborate with appropriate agencies and organizations to commission a multidisciplinary task force to review public health impact of obesity and recommend measures to better recognize and treat obesity as a chronic disease.” In the justification of that resolution, the committee stated, “There was some concern over the designation of obesity as a chronic disease, but your Reference Committee did not find this persuasive, particularly in light of the many adverse health outcomes associated with obesity and the fact that overweight and obesity is a multifactorial condition. Moreover, like other chronic conditions, obesity will require patients to actively participate in their care” ( 104 ).

24. The Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre ( 105 ), founded by the Belgian government in 2002, falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Health and Social Affaires and is responsible for the realization of policy supporting studies within the sector of health care and health insurance. This organization has provided statements on the issue that seem to directly contradict one another. One says, “Is obesity a disease? Severe obesity, as smoking, is a risk factor for increased morbidity and mortality, but a risk factor is not a disease. Smoking for instance is never called a disease. … But—disease or not—obesity is a cause of much suffering, and the medical community is confronted with it.” Others have contained the following: “Obesity can be defined simply as the disease in which excess body fat has accumulated to such an extent that health can be adversely affected”; “Obesity is a medical disease to the extent that it affects health, because of associated morbidities (hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, sleep apnea)”; and “There is evidence to support the idea that some forms of paediatric obesity should be considered as a disease that has to be treated.”

APPENDIX 3: Documents Relating to this Topic that were Reviewed but not Cited in Text

Aronne LJ. Obesity as a disease: etiology treatment, and management considerations for the obese patient. Obes Res 2002;10:95S–96S.

Bertière M-C. L'obésité est-elle une maladie? [French]. Revue de l'infirmière 1986;36:17–19

Bjorntorp P. Obesity: a chronic disease with alarming prevalence and consequences. J Intern Med 1998;244:267–269.

Bray GA. Obesity: the disease. J Med Chem 2006;49:4001–4007.

Cawley J. The impact of obesity on wages. J Hum Resources 2004;39:451–474.

Eckel RH, Krauss MR. American Heart Association call to action: obesity as a major risk factor for coronary heart disease. Circulation 1998;97:2099–2100.

Editorial: The chronic disease of childhood obesity: the sleeping giant has awakened. J Pediatr 2000;136:7113.

Examination Committee of Criteria for Obesity Disease in Japan, Japan Society for the Study of Obesity. New criteria for “obesity disease” in Japan. Circ J 2002;66:987–992.

Friedenberg RM. Obesity. Radiology 2002;225:629–632.

Fujioka K. Management of obesity as a chronic disease: nonpharmacologic, pharmacologic, and surgical options. Obes Res 2002;10:116S–123S.

Hill JO. Dealing with obesity as a chronic disease. Obes Res 1998;6:34S–38S.

Husemann BJ. Obesity: an innately incurable disease? Obes Surg 1999;9:244–249.

Jeffcoate W. Obesity is a disease: food for thought. Lancet 1998;351:903–904.

Jones AJ. Federal Court responses to state and local claims of “undue burden” in complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Publius 1994–1995;25:41–54.

Jutel A. The emergence of overweight as a disease entity: measuring up normality. Soc Sci Med 2006;63:2268–2276.

Kassirer JP, Angell M. Losing weight—an ill fated New Year's resolution. N Engl J Med 1998;338:52–54.

King EB, Shapiro JR. Hebl MR, Singletary SL, Turner S. The stigma of obesity in customer service: a mechanism for remediation and bottom-line consequences of interpersonal discrimination. J Appl Psychol 2006; 91:579–593.

Kopelman PG, Finer N. Reply: is obesity a disease? Int J Obes 2001;25:1405–1406.

Kristen E, Addressing the problem of weight discrimination in employment. California Law Rev 2002;90:57–109.

Kuss CL. Absolving a deadly sin: a medical and legal argument for including obesity as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. J Contemp Health Law Policy 1996;12:563–605.

Mayer K. An unjust war: the case against the government's war on obesity. LexisNexis Academic, 2004 Georgetown Law Journal 92 GEO. L.J. 999.

O'Brien PE, Dixon JB, Brown W. Obesity is a surgical disease: overview of obesity and bariatric surgery. ANZ J Surg 2004;74:200–204.

Rippe JM, Crossley S, Ringer R. Obesity as a chronic disease: modern medical and lifestyle management. J Am Diet Assoc 1998;98(Suppl 2):S9–S115.

Rossner S. Obesity: the disease of the twenty-first century. Int J Obes 2002;26(Suppl 4):S2–S4.

Sanofi-Aventis comments, Line 72. Obesity Is a Chronic, Relapsing Health Risk Defined by Excess Boy Fat. Docket 2007D-0040: Guidance for Industry on Developing Products for Weight Management < http:www.fda.govohrmsdocketsdockets07d004007d-0040-c000004-vol1.pdf > (10 April 2007).

Scherger JE. Obesity as a chronic disease. West J Med 1997;167:178.

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Volume 16 , Issue 6

Pages 1161-1177

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Obesity and Overweight: Probing Causes, Consequences, and Novel Therapeutic Approaches Through the American Heart Association's Strategically Focused Research Network

Information & authors, metrics & citations, view options, nonstandard abbreviations and acronyms, history of the sfrn.

Obesity SFRNs : Goals and Results

Johns hopkins university school of medicine obesity center: the role of trf on obesity and cardiometabolic health, central theme.

Basic Project

Major findings, clinical project, population project, new york university grossman school of medicine: braking inflammation in obesity and metabolic dysfunction: translational and therapeutic opportunities.

University of Alabama at Birmingham Center: University of Alabama at Birmingham Center Strategically Focused Obesity Center: Intergenerational Transmission of Obesity

Vanderbilt University Medical Center: Toward Obesity Precision Medicine: Promise of the Glucagon‐Like Peptide 1 Receptor

Center Collaborations

Johns hopkins university, johns hopkins university obesity basic and clinical projects, johns hopkins university obesity and new york university obesity centers, johns hopkins university obesity and university of alabama at birmingham hypertension centers, johns hopkins university obesity and johns hopkins university goredforwomen centers, new york university grossman school of medicine, obesity basic and population projects, university of alabama at birmingham center, obesity clinical and population projects, vanderbilt university medical center, vanderbilt obesity and vanderbilt vascular sfrns, training mission of the sfrn on obesity.

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