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The Enemy Within: Obesity
by Cathy Nonas, M.S., R.D. and Jeanine Albu, M.D.
Obesity continues to increase in epidemic proportions despite efforts to bring it under control. More than 61 percent of adults in the United States are now overweight or obese, according to National Institutes of Health estimates. More than 300,000 people die from problems related to being overweight each year. If the epidemic continues, the entire adult population will probably become overweight within the next three decades.
As obesity becomes more of a national issue, paradoxes abound:
- everyone's on a diet, yet people are getting fatter;
- obesity is called a disease, yet health insurance doesn't cover treatment;
- one diet points to carbohydrates as the culprit, another one assures us fats are to blame;
- we're told we eat too much,
yet portion sizes continue to
get larger.
Separating fact from fiction gets more and more complicated. Superficially, obesity is not difficult to understand. It is an interaction between genetics and the environment. Over the last 100 years, our genes have not changed; only our environment has. As much as we would like to think otherwise, a healthy weight is based on that often quoted mathematical equation: food consumption versus energy expenditure (or: "calories in versus calories out").
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