Obesity has became a worldwide epidemic, and around 2.8 million people are dying each year due to obesity. The major cause of obesity is the fast food culture and globalization. A study in 2006 found that over one-fifth of the one billion obese or overweight people in the world are Chinese, and one of the fattest nations in the developed world is Australia.
Obesity has been ranked as the fifth leading risk for deaths worldwide. The recent study done by World Health Organization (WHO) in 2011, states that 40 million children under the age of five are obese or overweight. Earlier, obesity was limited to high-income countries, but now there are no economical barriers, and obesity has became a global problem. The major cause for obesity is an energy imbalance between calories consumed by a person and calories expended. Nowadays, the foods that we consume are energy dense and are high in fat content, but our lifestyle has became sedentary, which expels very less calories from the body. This problem of obesity is slowly becoming an epidemic problem. So, to discuss the problem of obesity and evaluate a solution there was a Public Health Association of Australia, international nutrition experts meet at an obesity and nutrition conference in Sydney.One of the professor at the George Institute for Global Health in Sydney Mr. Bruce Neal said that, ?As fast as we get rid of all our traditional vectors of disease -- infections, little microbes, bugs -- we are replacing them with the new vectors of disease, which are massive transnational, national, multinational corporations selling vast amounts of salt, fat and sugar,? reported DNA newspaper.
The people are now accustomed to large servings of meals, which are well above their nutritional needs. Tim Gill, associate professor at the University of Sydney's Boden Institute of Obesity, Nutrition, Exercise and Eating Disorders says that, ?People will consume a portion that's put in front of them. People will seek value by purchasing the largest portion size, because it's relatively cheap compared to the smaller size. We've just had a disconnect in terms of what we need to eat and what we can purchase.
The problem lies with the food outlets also, as they only concentrate on their business and base their food choices on price rather than nutritional value. Jennie Brand-Miller, a professor at the University of Sydney's School of Molecular Bioscience, says that, ?Low-fat dietary advice has not been helpful on a population level. It is consistently associated with weight regain. It does not reduce the risk of chronic disease.
He also said that, to be healthy one should switch to diet that's protein rich, and has low GI carbohydrate content. And this should be the responsibility of the government to keep a check on the calorie content of the food that is being sold. By keeping certain limits on the salt, sugar and calorie content of the foods independently, the industries will also face less competitive pressure and the people will get healthy foods in the marketplace.
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