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X10FCA Reading and Writing in Academic Contexts
Group Work Project: Cover Page
GWP Topic:
Analyse the reasons for the increasing obesity epidemic in the
developing and/or developed world.
Each group member must place an ‘x’ next to the paragraphs they wrote or helped to write.
Group Member 1
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6520513
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The conclusion
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6520874
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6522505
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CELE: CENTRE
FOR ENGLISH
LANGUAGE
EDUCATION
2
Obesity can be defined as the fact of having abnormal or excessive fat
accumulation that may severely have negative effects on health. Due to the
difficulty of distinguishing it from overweight, body mass index (BMI) is used to
classify obesity and overweight by using a ratio of weight to height. Based on
this point, WHO (2015) defines obesity as a BMI equal to or more than 30. Once
considered a problem only in developed countries, adiposity is now also
becoming a health issue in developing countries, particularly in urban areas.
Therefore, as shown in Figure 1 (WHO, 2015), adiposity currently became a
global disease. The number of corpulent people has more than doubled since
1980 and 13% of them — more than 600 million adults worldwide — were obese.
Most seriously, obesity could be a primary reason for non-infectious diseases,
such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, musculoskeletal disorders and cancers.
It can be regarded as a leading cause of mortality, resulting in 2.8 million deaths
yearly (WHO, 2009 cited in Bullen and Feenie, 2015). Additionally, because of
health-care costs shared in most of countries, obesity could overburden the
entire healthcare system. Despite uncertainty about the aspects of obesity, there
have been three main reasons for the increasing epidemic in the developing and
developed world. In the following assignment, the lifestyle, economic and
cultural causes of obesity will be analysed.
Bad lifestyle is the most commonly implicated reasons of obesity, especially
when people are accustomed to eating a surfeit of fast food and high caloric food.
Figure 1
Prevalence of obesity, ages 18+, 2010-
2014
Fundamentally, obesity is usually based on an energy imbalance between calorie
consumption and calorie expenditure. If frequently take in more calories than
needed, body will store these unnecessary calories and transform it into body fat
that people’s weight gain (Harvard, no date). It has been reported by Cutler et al.
(2003) that the number of obese patients rapidly grew in America in this period
between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. The reason is that caloric intake of
Americans increased by the greater frequency of eating snacks. The average
number of snacks per day increased by 60% in 1974-1996. Meanwhile, the
intake of a person per day has been from 60 calories to over 200 calories per day
in the last three decades (ibid.). This situation can be attributed to the pace of
life speeding up and the technology of food manufacturing improving. Fast food
is quickly increasing in popularity in that its convenience, easy production and
low cost. Prentice (2006) further states that the dietary structure of all countries
has been changing rapidly, such as the growing intake of edible oil and animal-
source foods, leading to the excessive calories. It means that people all over the
world have more unhealthy eating habits. Refined grains, meat, unhealthy fried
food and sugary drinks have been the mainstream for western food habits.