Obesity As It Relates To Your Genes By: Becca Metzdorf

Obesity Is Ever-Growing

We Need a Solution! Obesity rates have been increasing and are expected to continue to increase in both children and adults. With obesity on the rise it is important that we work toward stopping it in its tracks, or at least slowing down the rate of increase.

Current Education on Health Education on health has become more prevalent in recent years. This education has mainly focused on healthy foods to eat to manage your diet, as well as the types and amount of exercise that would be ideal to have overall good health.

Gaps In Education We are generally knowledgeable now, in this day and age, on what foods are healthy and not healthy and exercise is important for our bodies to well function. We don’t know much about why some individuals can loose weight and why others have trouble. This is where education on our genetics comes into play.

Education On Our Genetics Education about our genetics will help us to understand how we should modify our diet and lifestyle to best compliment our genetic makeup. Some have genes that allow them to keep a healthy weight without necessarily the healthiest lifestyle. Others can have a healthy lifestyle and eat extremely healthy, but their genetic makeup makes it difficult to loose weight.

Let’s Combine Them All Together Knowing how our genetics influence our health is just as important as a healthy diet and exercise. The combination of the 3 aspects should help us gain an overall good understanding of what influences obesity rates.

Where To Learn About Genetics? To make this solution possible health classes in schools will need to adapt to this new aspect of health. Classes will also be offered at local community centers for adults to learn too.

Decreasing Obesity Rates With this solution individuals will better understand their genetics and learn how to adapt their lives, foods they eat and exercises they do, in order to be overall healthy. This knowledge will help to reduce obesity.