Blog #6

Scaffolding off my last few post, this week I am enlightening on the urgency to fight Obesity. Obesity as we all know is a growing global problem and it isn’t hard to recognize just by looking around. Obesity is running ramped all over the world and shows little sign of slowing down. "People need to want to change their lifestyles and take responsibility for their health." Yet there is a great deal the government can do to help them without falling foul of the familiar charge of nannying. Something the government can do is label supermarket foods. Also the government needs to consider applications for fast food outlets and reject them if necessary. When a street is already replete with a burger takeaway and two fried-chicken joints, the council ought to have the right to refuse permission for another and grant it to a shop selling fresh food. The government in Britain is promoting exercising and has built workout facilities and has given money to promote people to walk and cycle routes to school and work. MPs voted for a smoking ban because the public now feels entitled to eat and drink in a smoke-free environment. The right to be able to buy healthy food locally is just as important. Given the enormous cost to the NHS of diabetes and other obesity-related diseases, Ms. Hewitt could do more to help us turn away from the takeaway. In the USA today, this week they talked about the growing rate of obesity and how it is climbing higher and higher. Unfortunately people don’t realize the effects of such a massive problem. Obesity leads to several heart diseases along with posing major, deathly problems to people’s bodies.
It is hard to believe that the world is becoming more obese by the hour and so little is being done to counteract this problem. With every problem there has to be some sort of cause and solution. When thinking about obesity I kind of touched on some causes in my last post, where I explained how the constant stress of work and school and the little time people had in between caused people to gain weight. In my opinion this is still one of the main causes. College has the ability to take students time and money and without these two things they cannot afford nice healthy meals and don’t have the time to work out or exercise. But this also does not account for the young kids that are overweight and the rest of the population that are not in school or working. I believe the main reason certain children are overweight is because their parents, for one do not feed them the healthy foods they need along with the fact that television advertisements have evolved in such a way that children can’t help but eat bad foods. Companies come up with these advertisements for one reason and that is to get people to buy their product so they can make money. Money is a key reason for obesity in two ways: fast foods are cheap and big companies want your money no matter if you die from their product. I also think technology over the years have made people lazy in such a way that they put little to no effort in everything they do, in turn making them obese. I don’t believe that the government alone can make people eat or live healthy lives, I believe it starts with the individual and unless they want to make a change they honestly won’t.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree