OBESITY

Obesity is a growing global health problem.

Obesity is when someone is so overweight that it is a threat to their health.

Obesity typically results from over-eating (especially an unhealthy diet) and lack of enough exercise.

In our modern world with increasingly cheap, high calorie food (example, fast food — or “junk food”), prepared foods that are high in ingredients like salt, sugars or fat, combined with our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, increasing urbanization and changing modes of transportation, it is no wonder that obesity has rapidly increased in the last few decades, around the world.

Basic crops such as corn and soybeans are used to such an extent that many unhealthy and processed foods are created from them, at a subsidized rate, thus contributing to the problem. Because we subsidize those calories, we end up with a supermarket in which the least healthy calories are the cheapest. And the most healthy calories are the most expensive. That, in the simplest terms, is the root of the obesity epidemic for the poor—because the obesity epidemic is really a class-based problem. It’s not an epidemic, really. The biggest prediction of obesity is income.

Overweight and obesity are advancing rapidly in the developing world as well while 80 percent of the world’s hungry children live in countries with food surpluses.

For the first time in human history, the number of overweight people rivals the number of underweight people during the past decades.