Chew On This #3

Chew On This, by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, explains in great detail what junk food does to your body. It described obesity very well, explaining both the cause and effects of obesity.

Obesity is being extremely overweight. Two thirds of all adults and one sixth of all children in the US are overweight or obese. That's 50 million obese adults, along with 6 or 7 morbidly obese people. "Morbidly obese" people are about 100 pounds overweight than the standard weight. Since the 1970's, the obesity rate among adults has increased by 50%, the obesity rate among preschoolers has doubled, and the obesity rate among 6-11 year olds has tripled. Obesity is caused by many factors, including what you eat, how much you eat, how much you exercise, your genes, and even familial traits or racial traits. However, the familial and racial traits in the US have not changed very much in the last 30 years. So why has the obesity rate increased so much? It's really quite simple. In the past thirty years, Americans have begun to eat more, especially fatty, salty, and sugary foods. Also more and more people begun to get office jobs, so they exercise less. For thousands of years, humans had to hunt, fish and farm to get food. That took a great deal of effort and forced them to exercise. Early humans' worried about not having enough to eat, let alone to worry about getting fat. Fat cells were probably developed to store energy for periods of little food. In normal amounts, they are good for the body, signaling to the brain how much energy was stored and when it was time to eat. They even help the immune system, preventing cancer and disease. Typical people have 25 to 35 billion fat cells. Obese people have nearly eight times that amount: 275 billion fat cells! These fat cells require new blood vessels, place new demands on vital organs, create chemicals imbalances, and actually make the body more susceptible to disease. Fast food is one of the main causes of the obesity epidemic. It is usually not very nutritious, but high in salt, starch, sugar, fat, and calories. This is why sometimes fast food is also referred to as junk food.

Junk food does not only make you obese. It also affects other parts of the body. Foods that are high in sugar and bad fats such as cholesterol, trans fat, and saturated fat cause higher than normal amount of fat molecules in the blood which leads to blood vessels narrowing. If these blood vessels lead to the brain, they may not be able to carry all the blood that the brain needs, causing a stroke. That causes permanent severe brain damage or even death. If a piece of the fatty plaque that blocks the blood vessels suddenly breaks off, it may block the flow of blood to the heart, causing a heart attack. The liver, which processes all the fat, can also be damaged by junk food. If it gets full of fat, it begins to malfunction. Heart disease and stoke are the top killers in the US. With the growing popularity of fast food, heart disease is beginning to become more common among young people, probably due to junk food. We should try to avoid fast food and exercise more.