The U.S. health care system is implementing new guidelines to treat obesity as a disease and a key factor in other chronic and fatal health conditions, a move many experts believe to be long over-due.
New guidelines, released by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, advise the medical community to consider obesity a disease and to address it more actively through specific weight loss initiatives. However, health officials express concern that the disease isn't getting the attention it deserves as one of the leading health epidemics in the world.
Dr. Ruban Nirmalan, at IU Health Arnett specifically expressed concern over the way it is treated. Unfortunately, right now, in the medical field all we're doing is putting bandages on all the problems. Some of the biggest ones are diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, and there is an increased risk of certain cancers.
Unfortunately a lot of times we will treat the diabetes, the blood pressure, or treat the arthritis but the elephant in the room is the obesity, and unfortunately we don't have a good treatment for it in the United States we eat a lot of fast food, we drive everywhere and that puts us at risk for obesity, Nirmalan continued.
He described obesity as the number one medical problem in the United States, which rates number two for the highest rates of obesity in the world, saying obesity is linked to an increase in death, it causes a lot of problems.
The subsequent health problems of obesity and the risk factors in a person's family history passed down through the generations have become increasingly more of a burden. That's the siren sound we can no longer ignore, explains Dr. Gordon Tomaselli, chief of cardiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, and past president of the American Heart Association, as well as co-chair of the subcommittee that was responsible for guiding the final guidelines.
The World Health Organization advises preventing obesity through practicing healthy lifestyle choices, limiting fats and sugars and increasing the amount of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and nuts, and getting regular physical activity of at least 60 minutes per day for children and a minimum of 150 minutes per week for adults.
The Mayo Clinic agrees, stating, Despite all the diet strategies out there, weight management still comes down to the calories you take in versus those you burn off.
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