obesity_presentation.pptx

Obesity is a medical disease defined as the excessive accumulation of fat in adipose tissue to the extent that it may harm one’s health. Obesity is one of the leading preventable causes of death worldwide and it is generally diagnosed through the use of the body mass index (BMI) by physicians (Figure 1). <style float-right> </style>

Figure 1: Individual becoming obese over time from https://www.stayhealthy.com/Template/en_us/BinaryResource/Theme/Default/content/images/obesity_chart.jpg

The prevalence of overweight and obese individuals has increased globally by 37.5% in adults and 41.1% in children between 1980 to 2013. In 1980, there were about 921 million overweight and obese individuals which has grown to 2.1 billion in 2013. ^[1]

Figure 2: Age-standardized prevalence of obesity in women over 18 years of age (BMI greater than 30kg/m^2, 2014) from http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/WomenObese.jpg

This is particularly true for women, who have consistently shown a higher increase in obesity compared to men. This trend is observed in developing and developed countries alike.The rate of increase of obesity appears to have been gr