 | Joseph P. Galichia, MD is the founder and Medical Director of the Galichia Medical Group, PA. He is an internationally recognized pioneer in the field of interventional cardiology. In the 70's, Dr. Galichia studied in Zurich, Switzerland with the inventors of the balloon angioplasty technique for treating heart disease. As a result of his experience, he was able to bring this historic technique back to the United States where he was one of the first physicians to perform coronary angioplasty here. A noted medical spokesman, he appears on a weekly Newstalk segment on KWCH Channel 12 and has a weekly syndicated radio talk show on KNSS 1330 AM every Saturday live from 11:00 am to noon. Dr. Galichia may be contacted by sending an e-mail to service@galichia.com |
Health & Medicine
2007-04-01 16:42:00
Fat is never going to be healthy
We all know that obesity is on the rise. Simply put, how healthy or unhealthy is fat “really”?
ANSWER: All of us know that American people are getting larger all the time. We have gained some inches in height over the years but more importantly our weight and our body mass index (BMI) has grown disproportionately. We now eat too much, have too much body fat, exercise too little and continue to have more problems with diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and strokes. There is no question that the fat content of our bodies is increasing dramatically. This phenomenon has occurred not only in the US but is a developing problem in all parts of the world today, including Asia, where historically people have been much thinner and smaller than we Americans.
One of the questions people ask is, if I’m too heavy how does it really hurt me? Certainly we know that obesity puts a greater strain on your heart and leads to high blood pressure, as well. People who are overweight have more joint problems than other individuals. They tend to have higher lipid levels including high cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Certainly, we know that the dramatic rise in the incidence of diabetes is directly related to obesity and a lack of exercise. These are all health problems we can identify almost immediately as being related to being overweight. That is not to mention that there is some evidence that many cancers including breast and possibly prostate cancer are related to having a high body fat content.
In the aging process, it definitely appears to many scientists around the world that being overweight accelerates the breakdown of tissue in the body. Unfortunately, obesity is on the rise in our younger children with many overweight children being discovered in early childhood with a continuing rise into the early teen years. Children today, tend to be more sedentary, spending more time with their computers, video games and other electronic pursuits and less time exercising, playing in the yard and having fun playing outdoors. Indeed, there seems to be an increasing anxiety on the part of their parents to allow their children to play alone outside because of what appears to be a risk of sexual predators and other forms of crime in the environment.
The government has recently put forth a national initiative to attack the problem of obesity in our society. This is a struggle that has become a worldwide battle with almost every country in the world today experiencing the same phenomenon. We all have to eat less, exercise more and control the amount of fat that we take in. Indeed, losing weight as we age becomes a more and more difficult challenge, as most people simply gain a pound, and half pound, two pounds a year and inexorably become more and more overweight. The challenge we have today is one that is not easily solved by medications and in fact, many medications we commonly take, increase weight even further.
No simple solution exists for the problem. There are new drugs on the horizon, but none of them is a magic weapon in the fight against worldwide obesity.
