The Evolution of Obesity (Essay Sample)

The Evolution of Obesity
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The Evolution of Obesity
Worldwide obesity prevalence has been doubled from 1980 to present. There are many countries where the bug of obesity has killed many people. In 2014, six hundred million adults were obese. Almost one-third of the adults are overweight in developed countries (Henneberg and Grantham 2014). Obesity is explained as having too much fat in the body that may damage ones’ health. To classify obesity in adults’, a measurement tool named as BMI – Body Mass Index is used. If an individual’s body mass index exceeds 30 kg/m2, it means he or she is obese. There are several causes of obesity. Some examples are energy imbalance, increased consumption of energy-dense food, and decrease in daily exercise and physical activities.
Current obesity epidemic is the outcome of the close relation between human culture and biology. In ancient times when excess amount of energy was provided to humans, they had the ability to store body fat. However, modern humans face food shortage and are engaged in different kinds of physical activities. Furthermore, humans have developed complex physiological and genetic systems, which protect them against starvation and protects deposited body fat. Technological aids lessen physical effort, which give rise to an obesogenic environment, thus increasing the risks of obesity and associated diseases (Bellisari 2008).
According to Brown (1991), cultural and biological evolution framework provides the best understanding of human tendencies to obesity and fatness. Both, cultural traits and genes play a significant role in the etiology of adult obesity. The etiology of obesity must take a detailed account of social distribution of some conditions like ethnicity, economic upgrading, gender, and social class. This social distribution is involved cultural factors. The type of reproduction, cultural beliefs about food, productive economy, social structure, and ideal body size and shape are important cultural predispositions of obesity.
Patterns of life on earth have changed during the past sixty years due to certain economic, social, and technological changes. They also bring a change in diet and physical activity patterns, which gave rise to obesity among people including those living in developing countries. The increased rate of obesity is attributed to environments, which are considered obesogenic that are against our evolutionary custom. Different frameworks like behavior, physiology, environment, psychology, economy, and culture are used to study obesity (Ulijaszek and Lofink 2006).
Anthropologists Brown and Konner (1987) considered both cross-cultural variation and evolutionary background perspectives while studying obesity. According to them, there are three basic facts about obesity, which are
Increasing modernization,
Gender dimorphism, and
A positive relationship with socioeconomic status
During pre-industrial times, diets varied in quality and sometimes shortage of food may occur. That lack proved to be disadvantageous to those women who were in the family way. However, it favored those who stored fat for cultural and biological reasons. Further, majority of the cultures had an idea of plumpness as a part of females’ beauty. Due to increased obesity, the customary gap between females and males in their occurrence has contracted.
Eknoyan (2006) proposed that current worldwide prevalence of obesity is hardly few years old. After eighteenth century’s technological advances, there is a gradual increase in food supply. The early outcome of these developments is that they have enriched public health and have improved quality, variety, and the amount of food. It, as a result, increased body size and prolonged existence. Obesity is considered as a chronic disease, and it has a well-defined pathological consequence. Throughout the history, shortage of food led to inferences that being fat was good. Plumpness and increased flesh were appropriate, which are reflected in the literature, arts, and medical beliefs of those times. In the second half of the nineteenth century, fatness was marked out for appealing reasons whereas in the twentieth century increased mortality rate was associated with it. Some early reports associated obesity with hypertension, diabetes, kidney, and heart diseases.
Prentice et al. (2008) have challenged Speakman’s hypothesis that the current hereditary tendency of obesity has increased due to the random genetic drift in their research, in two million years’ subsequent predation issue. They have provided evidences to support the hypothesis that in post-agricultural seasonal food shortages and combination of the food crisis, it has applied choice in favor of fat storage. It effect is facilitated through fertility instead of viability. They concluded that it was time to stop previous searches because recently, advanced bioinformatics and genetic methods will soon offer a perfect resolution to ‘thrifty gene’ controversy.
Early primates make use of fructose, which was the primary nutrient in fruit. However, due to the global cooling, this food became less available. People are now using added sugars instead of fructose, which have reduced the use of fruits enrich in vitamin C. It is suggested that the interaction of diet with these genetic changes are responsible for obesity epidemic (Johnson et al. 2010). More than one-third of people are obese, but they are physiologically normal. However, certain number of people suffers from pathological conditions like heart disease and metabolic syndrome. The traditional description is that taking too much food and too little exercise cause obesity. This story is very simple whereas, tendency for obesity varies from individual to individual. Obesity has increased in modern affluent societies due to intake of animal protein. Before the advent of agriculture, humans mostly consumed a variety of aquatic and terrestrial animals with a few plants. In such situations, our bodies start using proteins as a source of energy and are capable of storing surpluses of amino acids. It leads to the breakdown of amino acids and its transformation in fats. In modern societies, humans consume many carbohydrates with fats, which provide them energy. It further leads to the breakdown of proteins, which easily transform into fats. Furthermore, when different types of crops are introdu7ced, and people start using them, their bodies may do not react appropriately to their contents. Therefore, some of their ingredients caused added fatness, for example, industrially processed soybean products show a relationship with an occurrence of obesity among many countries worldwide (Henneberg and Grantham 2014).
Lev-Ran (2001) said that in all developed countries, obesity has increased in recent years. In spite of harmful effects of obesity, these people’s life prolongs, may be due to the availability of better medical treatments. In the light of evolution, the expected occurrence of obesity can be understood easily. Genetic programming was necessary for the survival of humans. An example of genetic programming is disproportionate energy breakdown with heat buildup. Subcutaneous truncal fat and intra-abdominal fat; both are kinds of fats indicated high food intake in all human populations.
In human females, lower body fat is less metabolically active because it is programmed to work during lactation and pregnancy. According to this, standards of the preferred weight should be based upon morbidity and mortality figures, not on hypothetical, and fashion thoughts. The upper boundary of appropriate weight should be according to Body Mass Index (BMI), which is 27 or 28, however one should keep specifying it according to different populations of ethnic origin, sex, and race. Furthermore, the damaging effects of obesity weaken and finally fade away.
Hypertension and diabetes are obesity-related diseases, but they are also population specific. Fatness measured by BMI is inadequately considered as a risk factor whereas, fat in the lower body and upper body play an imperative role. It is important to take detailed standards of both, fat distribution and general obesity regarding different populations, which are not available yet. Furthermore, public health actions should be forcefully applied for the prevention of obesity from childhood.
In Spain, obesity has affected adults, children, and women specifically. Lifestyle changes have increased in Spain together with a rise in labor market contribution of women. These reasons together with other grounds for use of precooked or prepared food and decrease in their relative prices have indirectly increased calorie intake. Further, human physical energy spending has been reduced in domestic tasks and production processes because of easy accessibility to transportation. Although some monitoring steps have been taken to grab obesity in children, however, some other measures are used in different countries. These measures include educating people and accessibility of information regarding obesity for the population (García-Goñi et al. 2012).
Cynthia et al. (2010) studied relationship between obesity and socioeconomic status of adults in the United States from the period of 2005 to 2008. They found out that this relation differs according to race, sex, and ethnic groups. Their findings indicated that obesity increased among non-Hispanic white women when income decreases whereas, obesity decreases among non-Hispanic black and Mexican-Americans when income decreases. Furthermore, those women whose income is below 130% of the poverty level are more obese than those whose income is h...