Overcoming America's Obesity Problem One Step at a Time

            When I moved to America at ten years old, there were a lot of things I missed about my home country, but surprisingly to me, food was on the top of my list. It was hard for me to get used to the tomatoes or the strawberries here that didn’t have the same taste as I remembered. In all honesty, everything tasted bland. In my defense, I was spoiled when it came to food growing up in Poland. During the summers, everything my family and I ate was homemade, fresh from our gardens. During the winters, we bought more things from the stores, but we also had a lot of preserves and canned items saved from the summers. People ate more seasonally then, and more importantly, they ate less. It’s sad but true when I say I had never seen so many obese people until I came to America. In fact, before I moved here, I had never actually seen an obese person, just people who were slightly overweight. I quickly found out, however, that the type of food Americans eat is not the only cause for their obesity problem. The sheer amount of food they’re able to consume is another.

            An opinion piece in the New York Times titled, “The Toll of America’s Obesity” by David Ludwig and Kenneth Rogoff talks about the serious health and economic implications obesity is having on our society. First of all, with obesity continuing to grow, and affecting nearly four out of ten adults, serious weight-related problems, like “hypertension, fatty liver, orthopedic problems, sleep apnea and Type 2 diabetes,” as well as many mental health illnesses, are becoming more prominent not only in adults but in children and young adults as well. Other illnesses like “heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s,” as well as decline in life expectancy, have been shown to be related to obesity.

            While obesity creates multitudes of health problems in individuals, it also has a negative impact on the economy. The article cited talks about how in 2017 alone diabetes cost the United States $327 billion, while the overall effect of obesity is thought to affect four to eight percent of our country’s gross domestic product. For individuals this translates to higher medical costs and healthy diets that are costlier. For the United States economy, it means fiscal pressures to the national budget deficit and increased medical spending, leaving the country with a smaller budget for other important spending.

            The article argues that regardless of people’s personal, biological make-up, it is the government's job to promote a healthy lifestyle through government implemented policies and laws. At the moment, however, we are doing quite the opposite. Because of United States’ policies, which allow for the excessive amounts of processed foods, difficult to afford healthy food options, “food desserts” ,as well unhealthy food advertisements, the American people are failing to live a healthy lifestyle. The article argues five simple steps that could in return not only fight the obesity epidemic but also improve the economic standpoint for the country. The five steps include: establishing a “federal commission to coordinate obesity policy,” funding more obesity related research, imposing a tax on processed foods, prioritizing “the quality of the nutrition in the National School Lunch Program and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” and lastly, prohibiting advertisements of unhealthy food options targeting young adults.

            The research article, A Leptin Analog Locally Produced in the Brain Acts via a Conserved Neural Circuit to Modulate Obesity- Linked Behaviors in Drosophila, by Dr. Jennifer Beshel, focuses on the obesity problem, trying to find ways to fix it. Beshel’s research looks at a change in feeding behavior in flies, in a system very closely resembling that of mammals, after the deletion of the fly leptin analog unpaired 1(upd1). Through heat sensitive mutations, Beshel and her colleagues knockdown upd1 in flies, responsible in direct inhibition of a neuropeptide F. This neuropeptide F, in turn, was responsible for food intake and regulation of food odor in the brain. The research found that, compared to the control group, flies lacking the upd1 consumed more food, were heavier because of higher levels of fat storage, and showed more weight gain during the consumption of high-fat and high-sugar diets. For food odor responses, fed flies lacking the upd1 showed to have odor responses at the same comparable levels to starved flies with the upd1. When upd1 functions were restored to normal, the weight as well as food intake problems the flies were previously displaying, without the functioning upd1, were restored to normal. The research demonstrated the impact the upd1 has, “on feeding behaviors, such as responsiveness to food cues and food intake, that ultimately lead to weight gain (...)." 

            Because it is possible that Beshel’s research findings mirror what would happen as a result of impeding leptin expression in mammals, her research might be a key insight in fighting the obesity epidemic in the United States. As the New York Times article mentioned, one of the steps the government needs to take to improve the lives of millions of Americans, is by funding more research like Beshel’s. While the obesity epidemic is out of control, there are also many facets to the problem. Only through the collective efforts of many individuals from different fields - science, politics, agriculture, education- we can tackle the problem of obesity and improve American health, both physically and fiscally, for the better.





References


Beshel, Jennifer, et al. “A Leptin Analog Locally Produced in the Brain Acts via a Conserved Neural Circuit to Modulate Obesity-Linked Behaviors in Drosophila.” Cell Metabolism, vol. 25, no. 1, 2017, pp. 208–217., doi:10.1016/j.cmet.2016.12.013.


Ludwig, David S., and Kenneth S. Rogoff. “The Toll of America's Obesity.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 Aug. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/opinion/cost-diabetes-obesity-budget.html.