Actually, the obesity is a health problem
that affects millions of people around the world, even causing death. But,
sometimes people confuse obesity with overweight, and these are two differents
definitions, and obviously differents problems. On the one hand, we have the
overweight that is indicated for the body mass index (BMI) which is a formula
of the weight and the height. The normal BMI is between 8 and 25, when is
higher than 25 the person is overweight, and in the other hand we have obesity
that is even worst, in the same way is indicated by the BMI when this is higher
than 30. In this way, we can see the different between these two definitions,
and the indicator used for identifying them.
There are a lot of factors that can cause
being overweight and the obesity, although it is common that people think that
it is caused just by bad eating habits, that is just one of the causes, but its
not the only one. Is important to clarify that the fat accumulated in the body
when someone eats more calories than they need, for examples if someone eats
3500 calories per day and only uses 3000, the other 500 calories will be
accumulated in the body as fat. Additionally, sedentary life is another cause,
because the exercise helps to burn calories and be more healthy, and finally
the metabolism could be another cause, but this one is the more complicated
one, because its requires medication and medical control.
In the world, these two problems are very
common, however in some countries the index is higher than others. For example,
in Japan the government have good policies to promote the good eating
habits, like demand to companies to advise their employees that are overweight
about health, nutrition and good eating habits, and additionally companies must
have to have just a 10% of overweight employees. However, this case is an
exception, the rule is that in general countries don't have good policies to
help people to be healthy.
Furthermore, in Costa Rica overweight and
obesity are serious problems, and recently some studies about it show that
Costa Rica has very high index in child obesity, so this problem should push
the authorities to do something about this. In other way, if the costa rican
government doesn't do anything, this could be even a public health problem, so
we hope that soon other investigations in the country start, to understand all
the situation.
Finally, we can see that obesity and the
overweight are problems that affect all the world, and every year is worst, and
is important to considerate all the illnesses that are consequences of obesity.
Right now, Costa Rica is facing a problem that can be controlled but only if
the government and the people do something to fix this.