Obesity

An Epidemic

Akash Raju

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781637301678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: General Health

In 2017, it was estimated that over 4 million people died as a direct result of being overweight and or obese. From 1975 to 2016, children, age 5-19 showed an increase from 4% to 18% globally in obesity and overweight rates! With statistics like this, it's no wonder author Akash Raju felt a calling to publish his experience with and knowledge of this crisis. In his breakout book, Obesity: An Epidemic, Raju dives deep into complexities of obesity on many different levels. He asks, and answers, questions such as:

• How a person's life and habits could be contributing to obesity
• What role does the community, large and small, have on improving the obesity rates
• How the history of obesity affects the present and future aspects of the epidemic

With this in-depth overview of the many myths and truths about this disease, Raju creates a path to holistic and science-based approaches for combating this relentless killer. Obesity: An Epidemic is exactly the book anyone struggling with obesity or looking to gain a science-based perspective of the disease will want to read over and over again.

Chapter 6

Principles of Community-Based Obesity Management

Part 1

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How to Succeed

Imagine the classical fantasy story—a lone knight fighting a great beast. No matter what he does, how hard he tries, the monster shrugs off his attacks and marches on. The knight’s efforts seem futile, and it might seem an impossible task to overcome the creature. This situation is probably what you might be thinking of, given everything we discussed about obesity. How can we even hope to stop the crisis even as it continues to grow with every passing year? It seems like all the public health campaigns and government funding initiatives in the world have failed to slow it down. Trust me; you are not alone. For the longest time before writing this book, I believed it was hopeless to tackle the crisis. So much effort has already gone into fighting it, but like the beast of our story, it continues its inexorable march, and it seems like an impossible task to fight it. Yet, with much research, I discovered there are glimmers of hope, a way for the knight to save the day. The answer lies in the form of community initiatives centered around certain principles that allow them to tackle obesity.

Before we launch into a full-fledged discussion on solutions regarding the obesity crisis, we must first discuss how to judge if a solution that is targeting obesity is successful or a failure. This tracking of obesity is also necessary for what kind of solutions must be implemented in different areas, if at all. After all, it doesn’t make sense to promote massive obesity initiatives in areas with nonexistent rates of obesity; that’d just be a waste of resources.

An individual is commonly diagnosed with obesity if he or she has a BMI greater than 30. This means he or she has a large excess of bodyweight for a given height. Most official statistics regarding obesity use this measure of BMI to calculate the obesity rates in different communities in wide swathes of the country.136 This is often done on the field by measuring BMI by measuring large representative samples of the population’s height and weight.137 This makes BMI an efficient and relatively cheap way to measure obesity rates amongst large numbers of people.

However, there are many naysayers who point out there is a flaw in this method and that judging solutions based on obesity measured by BMI may be inaccurate. The large excess of bodyweight for a given height I measured earlier might not always be fat. It could be muscle or bone, and the excess weight could result in the person being classified as obese, even though he doesn’t actually have the fat associated with obesity. This is right, in fact, and there are individuals with such a body type.138 Despite this, the population of individuals with enough muscle mass to put them in the obesity category is an extremely small unrepresentative proportion of the population. As a result, this figure is generally negligible when calculating overall obesity rates for tens of millions of people throughout the country and does not introduce any measurable error in obesity rate calculations. Many personal trainers and popular fitness figures who are experts on the topic assert the same. Due to their own personal experience and expertise regarding nutrition, many believe that while BMI may not be the most accurate predictor of an individual’s health, it is important for observing general population health trends. One specific personal trainer, Tom Mans, asserted that despite being a very fit and lean individual, he would be considered “overweight and nearly obese according to [his] BMI” and that BMI is generally “only of any use when observing large populations and it should not be used on an individual basis.”139

What Makes a Community Solution to Obesity Successful

I believe for any obesity initiative to succeed, it must proceed with a grassroots principle so that it can create lasting, sustainable change. These solutions are ultimately more effective than top-down change from the central government due to the fact that these community initiatives can be tailored to the unique needs of the community in question. A solution that targets education in one area to reduce obesity might not be effective in another community that might need to focus more on cultural reform to reduce obesity rates.140

Top-down obesity initiatives disregard the grassroots principle and essentially brute force their solutions onto communities and fail in the process. Numerous examples of failed government interventions against obesity can attest to this argument. Numerous public health campaigns against obesity have, in fact, failed to produce much effect in actually reducing food consumption among communities. For example, a Mercatus Center working paper stated that an initiative in New York designed to raise awareness of the risks of diabetes and weight gain from excessive soda drink consumption failed to reduce soda intake at any significant level within the state.141 This was despite the millions of dollars in taxpayer money used to fund the campaign. In addition, it is possible that these top-down government initiatives are even counterproductive to obesity efforts, as government regulators are known to have cut down on more varied solutions offered by weight loss centers, gyms, and private companies. Some of these potentially could have been used to fight obesity in the local areas, but unfortunately, we’ll never know.142

However, I must stress a fundamental key point in this discussion: while it is important that obesity initiatives be community-tailored and not suffer a top-handed approach, any successful initiative must have strong leadership. Cohesive and efficient management in an obesity initiative can set out proper goals for the organization to achieve, measure progress on actually impacting obesity, and track funds to meet proper goals. This structure will also ensure that the success of the initiative can actually be evaluated and if any fundamental reorganization is necessary to improve its ability to meet its goals.143

A significant reason why Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign during the 2013 health initia...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• A History of Obesity
• The Modern Perspective on Obesity
• Myths About Obesity
• The Causes of Obesity
• The Effects of Obesity
• Principles of Community-Based Obesity Management Part 1
• Principles of Community-Based Management Part 2
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• APPENDIX