Healthy Vending: Obesity at Epidemic Levels

Author: Laura Rayburn

Next time that you are out at a mall, an airport, or anywhere else that you can find a large number of people milling around, check out the look of your fellow man. It's very likely that you will see a significant percentage of obese or overweight people in those crowds. Obesity is reaching epidemic levels in this country and in others, and it is bringing more problems with it as the numbers rise. We at Yo Naturals healthy vending are doing our best to fight this pervasive atrocity.

As people have trended toward eating foods that are loaded with calories while shunning physical activity, obesity has reached epidemic levels around the globe. Researchers estimate the number of overweight adults in this world to be over 1 billion with about 300 million of those people meeting the standards of being considered clinically obese. In turn, obesity is a major contributing factor in a number of chronic diseases and ailments.

Unfortunately, this problem is not confined to adults, as obesity in children is also on the rise. Researchers estimate that worldwide there are around 22 million children under the age of five that are overweight. In America specifically, the Surgeon General says that the number of overweight children has doubled since 1980, and the number of overweight adolescents has tripled.

Genes do also play a role in the development and prevalence of obesity, although they cannot be solely to blame for the rapid rise in obesity around the globe. Even as technology and economic growth has changed the face of our world and the way that we interact with one another, it has also played a role in making high calorie foods more available to the population at large and in decreasing the need for physical labor and activity in order to make a living. Obesity is not restricted to fully industrialized nations though, as a number of studies have shown through statistics and information on the rapid rise of obesity in developing nations. Obesity is quickly becoming a problem on all seven continents and from sea to shining sea.

The bad news does not end there either. The costs of the increasing prevalence of obesity put strains on health care systems that have to deal with the many diseases and conditions that are related to and have resulted from obesity, including high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, and increased insulin resistance. Many common cardiovascular diseases can be traced back to the prevalence of obesity, as can the rising number of cases of Type 2 diabetes. (Out of the people with Type 2 diabetes, an overwhelming 90 percent of them are obese or overweight.)

It is quickly becoming evident that effective weight management techniques will have to be taken up by the world at large if we expect to get our problem with obesity and all of its related problems under our control again. So, next time you think about eating from a machine, make sure its a healthy vending machine.