Obesity Risk Tripled by TV and Fast Food
If you are significantly overweight, you have a risky lifestyle. You probably don’t jump out of airplanes or engage in extreme sports, but your lifestyle is riskier than if you did. Obesity is a risk factor for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure, among other potentially lethal health conditions. The incidence of obesity in America has increased dramatically over the past couple of decades to the point that it has been declared a national health emergency.
If you are obese, you are at risk for a number of serious health problems. But what kinds of things increase your risk for obesity? Recent studies have identified three factors that can triple your risk—and your kids’ risk—of obesity: fast food, TV, and inactivity.
Fast Food
People who eat fast food meals more than once a week have an increased risk for obesity.
There are several reasons why fast food meals increase the risk for obesity. Fast food tends to be higher in calories, saturated fat, salt, sugar, low quality carbohydrates, and are lower in complex carbohydrates and fiber than food prepared at home. The serving sizes are larger too, and a super-sized fast food meal can contain 1600 calories or more.
Fast food meals are full of empty calories, so they aren’t satisfying. If you include a sugary soft drink, you may get a sugar low an hour or so later, and feel the need to eat again. With a fast food meal, you tend to eat more than you normally would, and still “want something” later.
Lack of Exercise
A sedentary lifestyle also increases your risk for obesity. Not only do you burn fewer calories when you are inactive, but your metabolic rate—the rate at which you burn calories—decreases, so that you conserve fat. In other words, if you are not active, not only is your body not working to lose weight, but it is actually working against your weight loss efforts.
Thirty minutes a day is enough exercise to decrease your risk of becoming obese, but if you’re already overweight, you’ll probably have to double that to take the weight off. You can break up your exercise into ten to fifteen minute segments, and you only have to exercise hard enough so that you breathe a little harder. Any increase in exercise has health benefits, even getting up and walking around the room a couple of times.
TV
Researchers have found a direct correlation between obesity and TV watching. Watching TV, in and of itself, probably doesn’t increase your risk for obesity. Hours spent in front of the TV however, are sedentary hours. One reason TV watching increases obesity risk is because you aren’t moving around and being active while you’re watching.
Another reason TV watching is linked to obesity is because during the hours you are watching, you are exposed to hundreds of advertisements for…fast food. Fast food vendors (and other companies) spend billions of dollars annually for TV ads that try to get us to buy fast food, and they work. The more TV you watch, the more likely you are to go grab a fast food meal.
If you want to be healthy and minimize your risk for serious health problems, the most effective thing you can do is to control your weight. If you want to control your weight, the most effective thing you can do is turn off the TV. The second most important is to get moving, and then avoid fast food. For adults, doing those three things will make you healthier. For children, doing those three things will prevent a lifetime of obesity and the health problems that go with it.