|
A New Cause of Suffering A conference on obesitywas recently held in Vienna. Two thousand experts from more than fifty countries attended the conference. According to statistics, 1.2 billion people worldwide are overweight, and 250 million are too fat. Obesity is rapidly becoming a new cause of suffering. Professor Friedrich hopichler of Salzberg said: we are living in the new age but with the metabolismof a stone-age man .I have just been to the United States. It is really terrible. A pizza shop is appearing on every corner. We have been occupied by fast food and Coca-Cola-ization. Many of the experts stressed that obesity was a potential killer. Hopichler said: eighty per cent of all diabeticsare too fat, also fifty per cent of all patients with high blood pressure and fifty per cent with fatty tissue complaints. Ten per cent more weight means thirteen pet cent more risk of heart disease. Reducing ones weight by ten per cent leads to thirteen per cent lower blood pressure. Another expert Hermann Toplak said that the state health services should improve their financing of preventive programs. the health insurance pays for surgerywhen the body-mass indexis more than 40. That is equivalent to a weight of 116 kilograms for a height of 1.60 meters. One should start earlier. Toplak said tat prevention should begin in school. Child obesity has a close relation with the time which children spend in front of TV sets. | 
