Persuasive Essay On Obesity

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Jake is a typical ten year old that gets caught up in the culture of today. He starts watching TV every afternoon after school while he snacks on his favorite chips and desserts. Fifteen years later at twenty his bad childhood habits are catching up with him. He has been diagnosed with type two diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and has had a small heart attack. All of these health problems have left him in debt, and he is too unhealthy to go to work, meaning that he may be stuck in debt forever. Twenty years later Jake dies after living a miserable life because his body couldn’t keep fighting him. His obesity beat him out. The growing epidemic of obesity is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. It has been …show more content…

because it has had such a large growth in the last 40 years. In the early 1990’s all of the U.S. states had lower than a 19% obesity percentage (Freedman). Going back even farther to the 1970’s, the overall percentage of obese people for the whole country was only 15% (Freedman). Since then there has been a huge growth, and now every state is above that 19% mark and has been above it since 2010 (Obesity ProCon.org). In fact, at least two-thirds of all the U.S. states are even over 25% …show more content…

The ten most obese states showed the highest percentages of high blood pressure (35.8%), high cholesterol (28.2%), depression (20.7%), diabetes (14.3%), cancer (7.8%), and heart attacks (5.0%) (Obesity ProCon.org). The ten least obese states showed the highest amount of exercise and healthy eating. A study by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) was done to show people that they are more likely to die if they are overweight or obese. Their 10 year study of nearly 1.5 million people showed that those that were overweight or obese had a much higher chance of dying young than those who had a healthy weight (Liebman). This proves that excess weight is a huge problem that strongly affects our health. American Cancer Society 's Michael Thun reported: “In 2003, we estimated that 90,000 deaths due to cancer could be prevented each year in the United States if men and women could maintain normal weight.” Bonnie Liebman also points out in her article Weighing the Options that obesity can help in increasing the chances of many

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