From Your Health Journal…..”We know that obese individuals have some health issues such as heart disease, diabetes, low self esteem, and many other concerns. Now, the term weightism comes into center stage, where overweight as well as skinny people are being discriminated against because of their appearance. This also includes children. In the USA, the incidence of childhood obesity has doubled in the last 10 years. Overweight or obese children have a much greater risk growing into overweight or obese adults. So, once again, we need to support adults and children and not make judgement on them solely based on their looks. I highly recommend reading this article as it has some amazing insight.”
From the article…..
The word ‘weightism’ is a relatively new addition to our language. It refers to discrimination against obese, overweight, and even underweight people. This type of discrimination can take different forms, ranging from refusing to employ someone because he or she is too fat or too thin, to treating overweight and underweight individuals with disdain.
Research shows that even physicians take part in weightism just as much as the general public. In fact, even doctors who are overweight themselves have negative attitudes to their overweight patients. A recent study of 2,300 doctors found that most were biased against their obese clients, considering them difficult to work with and unattractive.
The Fat Facts
The World Health Organization (WHO) has been talking about the “globesity epidemic that it considers to be the greatest health problem of our times. It predicts that by 2015, there will be 2.3 billion overweight adults in the world, and more than 700 million of them will be frankly obese.
Diabesity is the new word used to describe the close connection between obesity and Type 2 diabetes. According to the International Diabetes Federation, the number of Type 2 diabetics worldwide has grown over 500 per cent in 20 years. Hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans are suffering unnecessarily from this largely preventable and curable disease.
Obesity also increases the risk of other serious health problems, including heart and circulatory disorders, arthritis, gallbladder and kidney disease, and cancers of the breast, colon, uterus, oesophagus, and kidneys. Medical experts have listed over 150 medical conditions related to obesity. Obesity and weight-related illnesses have now surpassed cigarette smoking as the number one preventable cause of death.
The more weight a woman gains, the more likely she is to develop breast cancer. Overweight women have a 30 per cent greater chance of dying from breast cancer than women of normal weight. In the United States of America alone, an estimated 18,000 deaths per year from breast cancer could be avoided if women maintained normal body weight.
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