Health Promotion And Obesity In The United States

The Prevalence of Health Issues in the United States

Health promotion is a process in which effective strategies are taken in order to enable the people to enhance control over various health issues and improve their health condition and maintain well-being. (Eldredge et al., 2016). In United States it has been found that modern life has led to the increase in the various health issues due to unhealthy diet, lack of physical activities, substance abuse and other unhealthy behaviors as well. Majority of the population has been found to suffer from different health issues including mild health problem to acute or chronic disease (Moncayo & Silveira, 2017). Statistics have reported that approximately 99 million people in United States are suffering from high cholesterol, 20% people have been found to suffer from gastrointestinal problem, approx. 25 million patients have been found with asthma and 7 million people have been found to suffer from COPD (who.int, 2018). In addition the national diabetes statistics report has revealed that the numbers of people suffering from type 1 and type 2 diabetes have been increased from 29.1 million to 25.8 million in two years (cdc.gov, 2018). Furthermore, other respiratory disease, cardiovascular issues, mental health issues and cancer is also common in the population (Moncayo & Silveira, 2017). Study has indicated that the main factor that has led to the consequence of such diseases is obesity. 1 out of 3 adults in United States has been found to suffer from obesity (Ng et al., 2014). Such increase rate of obesity has affected the quality of life in the population. Thus, obesity has been identified as the major health problem especially for older adults in United States.

Obesity has been chosen as the major health issue in United States for this project. In this regards it has been found that there are various behavioral factors that contribute to the consequence of obesity in an effective manner. Unhealthy eating habit is one of the main factors that leads to the condition of overweight. In the recent days people are more addicted to unhealthy and high caloric foods such as burger, pizza, fast foods and others. In addition intake of high caloric sugar beverages has also increased (Sharma & Fulton, 2013). On the other hand, with increasing intake of high caloric food the rate physical activities has decreased significantly. People have adapted the luxury lifestyle and started to use modern technologies to ease their life which has reduced the rate of their daily physical activity and has influenced obesity (Strasser, 2013). In addition, smoking has been found as the risk factor of obesity. Study has indicated that smoking affects the fat distribution of the body and could act as the risk factor of obesity (Dare, Mackay & Pell, 2015). Furthermore, behavior such as excessive alcohol intake is also associated with obesity as alcohol is a high caloric drink (Boyle et al., 2014). Among such behaviors the most amenable behavior to intervention is food intake or diet of the people. Introducing interventions to control the food intake by providing the knowledge regarding healthy diet and nutrition would help to create awareness and could help to induce healthy eating habit to control other health issues as well (Sharma & Fulton, 2013).

Contributing Factors to Obesity

In addition there are some environmental factors as well that influence obesity. Food advertising and availability of unhealthy food and beverages at reasonable price are some potential factors that influence people to intake such unhealthy foods. On the other hand, lack of physical activity and nutritious food are considered as risk factors of obesity and people with low socioeconomic condition are more prone to such risk factors (Bhurosy & Jeewon, 2014). Education is another potential factor. Due to lack of education people lack adequate knowledge about proper diet, nutrition, obesity and health issues associated with it, thus, they fail to take effective measures to control obesity (Cawley, Frisvold & Meyerhoefer, 2013). Hence, it is important to introduce interventions to address such environmental factors to reduce the prevalence of obesity.

Predisposing factors- Predisposing factors are defined as the factors that influence a person to develop a behavior. There are various predisposing factors that influence the behaviors that could lead to the consequence of obesity. For example, genetics is one of such predisposing factors. The genetic influence could lead to some behavior associated with obesity such as, smoking, alcohol intake and excessive food intake as well. In addition, obesity could be occurred due to genetic factors. On the other hand, life events such as death of loved one, family conflict, financial crisis and others are considered as predisposing factor that could lead to excessive smoking and alcohol intake (Xia & Grant, 2013).

Enabling factors- Enabling factors refer to forces that facilitate or hinder the changes in behavior according to the availability. Such factors include resources, accessibility or availability. In case of behavior that induces obesity the enabling factors may include the availability of the unhealthy foods at reasonable price. On the other hand availability of tobacco or alcohol is also high that could act as the enabling factor. Such increase in the availability or accessibility of resources has contributed effectively to the increase in unhealthy behavior that could lead to obesity (Boyle et al., 2014).

Reinforcing factors- Reinforcing factors include the factors that reinforce or reward the behaviors such as social or economic factors. In case of obesity, poor socioeconomic status of people, education, increasing advertisement on food and beverages could be considered as the social factors that influence the behaviors such as lack of nutritious food, substance abuse, lack of physical activity and unhealthy diet that increase the risk of obesity in an effective manner (Bhurosy & Jeewon, 2014).

Various interventions such as individual level interventions and social or environmental interventions have been taken in order to address the risk factors of obesity and reduce the prevalence in the population. In this regards different policies in the state level and by local governments have been introduced such as Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity (yaleruddcenter.org, 2018). Organizations such as state policies to prevent obesity: Better policies for a healthier America have been introduced to provide effective strategies to control obesity in the population (stateofobesity.org, 2018). Adequate resources also play an important role to facilitate the interventions such as ground for physical activity, different program to screen the health issues and education program to help people learn about obesity and management process (Hawkes et al., 2015). However, there are some circumstances that could hinder the interventions. For example, it is not possible to restrict people to eat the food of their choice and the food and beverage industry could not be eliminated as it contributes to the GDP of the country. Such situation could reduce the effectiveness of the interventions (Roberto et al., 2015). Thus, individual; level awareness is important to control obesity and live healthy life.

Behavioral Factors

In order to address the previous question effective and relevant secondary data such as book, journal articles from last five years have been used. Data bases such as Google Scholar and PubMed have been used to find out the relevant sources. In case of preparing a project in real life adequate data sources such as primary data and secondary data will be required. For primary data survey or interview of the nurses, general practitioners and patients with obesity will be conducted. For secondary data relevant data previous literatures from book, article will be gathered and important government websites and hospital records will be checked to gather required assessment data (Goodman, Cryder & Cheema, 2013).

References:

Bhurosy, T., & Jeewon, R. (2014). Overweight and obesity epidemic in developing countries: a problem with diet, physical activity, or socioeconomic status?. The Scientific World Journal, 2014.

Boyle, T., Fritschi, L., Tabatabaei, S. M., Ringwald, K., & Heyworth, J. S. (2014). Smoking, alcohol, diabetes, obesity, socioeconomic status, and the risk of colorectal cancer in a population-based case–control study. Cancer Causes & Control, 25(12), 1659-1668.

Cawley, J., Frisvold, D., & Meyerhoefer, C. (2013). The impact of physical education on obesity among elementary school children. Journal of Health Economics, 32(4), 743-755.

cdc.gov (2018). National Diabetes Statistics Report | Data & Statistics | Diabetes | CDC. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/data/statistics/statistics-report.html

Dare, S., Mackay, D. F., & Pell, J. P. (2015). Relationship between smoking and obesity: a cross-sectional study of 499,504 middle-aged adults in the UK general population. PloS one, 10(4), e0123579.

Eldredge, L. K. B., Markham, C. M., Ruiter, R. A., Kok, G., & Parcel, G. S. (2016). Planning health promotion programs: an intervention mapping approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Goodman, J. K., Cryder, C. E., & Cheema, A. (2013). Data collection in a flat world: The strengths and weaknesses of Mechanical Turk samples. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 26(3), 213-224.

Hawkes, C., Smith, T. G., Jewell, J., Wardle, J., Hammond, R. A., Friel, S., … & Kain, J. (2015). Smart food policies for obesity prevention. The Lancet, 385(9985), 2410-2421.

Moncayo, Á., & Silveira, A. C. (2017). Current epidemiological trends of Chagas disease in Latin America and future challenges: epidemiology, surveillance, and health policies** This paper did not receive any financial support. In American Trypanosomiasis Chagas Disease (Second Edition) (pp. 59-88).

Ng, M., Fleming, T., Robinson, M., Thomson, B., Graetz, N., Margono, C., … & Abraham, J. P. (2014). Global, regional, and national prevalence of overweight and obesity in children and adults during 1980–2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013. The lancet, 384(9945), 766-781.

Roberto, C. A., Swinburn, B., Hawkes, C., Huang, T. T., Costa, S. A., Ashe, M., … & Brownell, K. D. (2015). Patchy progress on obesity prevention: emerging examples, entrenched barriers, and new thinking. The Lancet, 385(9985), 2400-2409.

Sharma, S., & Fulton, S. (2013). Diet-induced obesity promotes depressive-like behaviour that is associated with neural adaptations in brain reward circuitry. International journal of obesity, 37(3), 382.

stateofobesity.org (2018). State Policies to Prevent Obesity – The State of Obesity. Retrieved from https://stateofobesity.org/state-policy/

Strasser, B. (2013). Physical activity in obesity and metabolic syndrome. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1281(1), 141-159.

who.int (2018). United States of America. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/countries/usa/en/

Xia, Q., & Grant, S. F. (2013). The genetics of human obesity. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1281(1), 178-190.

yaleruddcenter.org (2018). Home – UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. Retrieved from https://www.yaleruddcenter.org/legislation/