A classic meal in the USA is related to our food chains that we’ve created to give us a warm meal away from home. Yet these delicious commodities do not have a great effect on the people’s health. Six Big Macs could later become a Mcheart attack. We still find these types of products in schools all over, and what child would not want to consume a beefy cheeseburger and juicy fries? All those bad habits have caused us to become the country with the highest obesity rate. With 30.3% of obese citizens in the U.S. we beat Mexico and the United Kingdom and we’re still getting fatter by the day. Out of our 50 states, 33 states have an obesity rate equal or greater than 25% (CDC). Due to the modern conveniences like fast food, the obesity rates in the US are increasing tremendously. Mean while, nothing in the government is being done to stop these upsetting rates. Taking a close look into our increasing obesity rates we see that obesity is causing many complications with the economy and our overall health, responses in our country are happening to stop this alarming rate from proceeding, and we need a call to action to halt this whole mess.
[Although obesity has had a huge hit nowadays, it has a controversial past.] Compared to the white population, African Americans have 51 percent more in obesity rates, and 21 percent higher than the white population for Hispanics. Also, most of the obese citizens are concentrated in the South east (CDC). There are many differences with obesity in ethnicities, but the aspects of adolescent obesity are frightening. 1 out of 5 adolescents are obese in the United States. Even teens with 80 to 100 pounds of excess body weight are growing faster than teens that are just moderately obese (Healy 22). The extremes are rising till we reach a catastrophe. Now picture this, 12 million children/adolescents are obese in our country. In a high school, 12% of high school students are obese while 15.8% are overweight. Our nation is plumping up like Thanksgiving turkeys until we can barely walk (Hendrick “Obesity Swells in 28 states”). In the article "Obesity 'epidemic': Who are you calling fat?" from Independent Newspapers, Patrick Basham and Jane Feinman state how banning the advertisement of junk food will not stop a child from becoming obese. Also he/she analyzes the Department of Health’s survey, published in 2004, which stated that children aged 11-15 years old had a 17.5% decline in obesity rates. So yes, the rates might have declined a bit but the 18% rate is still very high and the disease rates are still rising. To the banning of ads thought, when I was a kid and I saw a McDonald’s commercial, I would pester my mom to go there ASAP! From those commercials comes the idealism of I need, so how could a kid resist that? With childhood obesity increasing due to the new age of fast food dinners and all you can eat portion sizes soon enough they could pass the adult percentage of obesity of 34%. By 2015, it has been predicted that the obesity rate for children and adolescents will be 41%. That surpasses the adult rate by 6%. That’s 9% away from being half of our population. Every year 400,000 people die from effects of obesity. With half of the population being exposed to that our nation could crumble (Hendrick “Obesity Swells in 28 states”). Now there is surely an unequal balance among the states. In our country, Mississippi has the highest obesity rate of 34.4%, second in this twisted hierarchy is a tie between Alabama and Tennessee with 31.6%, and is third place is West Virginia with 31.3% (Hendrick “Obesity Swells in 28 states”). [The United States is bursting at the seams, but of course there’s always a reason behind the problem, in this case a majority of our obesity comes from our precedent of fast food chains. ]
It’s sad to think that even our infamous veggies made from our successful GMO’s have been pushed aside by French fries, which are our number 1 eaten vegetable in this country. “McDonald's