Did you know that 5000,000 people die in America due to junk food? According to U.S Department of Health and Human Services, this number of deaths are similar to the number of deaths caused by tobacco and thirteen more than caused by guns. Also, having bad eating habits can affect your health in several ways including diseases such as: obesity, diabetes type 2, hypertension, high blood pressure, and forms of cancer. “Poor nutrition habits can be a behavioral health issue, because nutrition and diet can affect how you feel, look, think, and act.
A bad diet results in lower core strength, slower problem solving ability and muscle response time, and less alertness.” (Ripa Ajmera, Live Strong). To begin with, the obesity is one of the diseases caused by poor nutrition that most affect adults and children in America. Obesity is a condition that is associated with ”having an excess of body fat”, and it is classified as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or greater.
In general, more than two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, and at least 300 million are clinically obese (Ogden et al., 2014).
Furthermore, being obese increases your risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, arthritis, and some cancers. If you are obese, losing 5 to 10 percent of your weight can delay or prevent some of these diseases. Another worrying fact is that childhood obesity has more than doubled in children in the past 30 years, and 28% of children aged 2 to 15 are classed as either overweight or obese. In addition, obese youth are more likely to have risk factors for cardiovascular disease, such as high cholesterol or high blood pressure.
In a population based sample of 5 to 17 year olds, 70% of obese youth had at least one risk factor for cardiovascular disease (Center for Diseases Control and Prevention). Preventing these diseases is not as difficult as you might think. Little steps can improve your eating habits just by changing the environment that you usually have lunch, for example; however, physical activity is the most important one. Keeping active can help people stay at a healthy weight or even lose weight. It can also lower the risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, and types of cancers, as well as reduce stress and boost mood, while inactive (sedentary) lifestyles do the opposite. Another important step is to drink water instead of sugary drinks.
Water makes up more than half your body weight, and every cell in your body needs water to function correctly. In addition, water does not have calories or sugar, but drinks such as soda, fruit drinks, and sports drinks all contain added sugars, which usually means that sugar has been added to them to make them taste sweeter. The World Health Organization, and the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services says that despite all the health benefits of physical activity, people worldwide are doing less of it, which increases the risk of the diseases cited above. Globally, about one in three people gets little, if any, physical activity. ”Physical activity levels are declining not only in wealthy countries, such as the U.S., but also in low- and middle-income countries, such as China. And it’s clear that this decline in physical activity is a key contributor to the global obesity epidemic, and in turn, to rising rates of chronic disease everywhere”
Bad Eating Habits and Poor Nutrition Can Cause Obesity. (2022, Oct 12). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/bad-eating-habits-and-poor-nutrition-can-cause-obesity/