Obesity

What is Obesity

Obesity stands for excess body weight or excessive body fat.

Why is it important to have a healthy weight?

Being overweight or obese increases your risk for many diseases. Just to list a few – diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, certain cancers. These are called weight related diseases.

Among females it can cause irregular menstrual cycles, male pattern / unwanted hair growth and infertility.

Healthy weight has several benefits; you feel good and feel more energetic to enjoy life.

How can you know your risk for weight-related diseases?

It’s not easy to directly measure your body fat. Hence there are several means of estimating the same:

• Body Mass Index (BMI)
• Waist Circumference Measurement
• BIA

Body Mass Index (BMI)

• You can estimate your BMI from the calculator below:

• BMI Calculator for Indians

  Height Unit:
  Feet Centimeters
• Height:
  
  Eg. 5ft 3½ inch
  as 5.3.5
• Weight(Kg):
  

Body Mass Index (BMI) does have limitations.

• It may overestimate body fat in athletes and others who have a muscular build.
• It may underestimate body fat in older persons and others who have lost muscle.
• These may be overcome by other measures such as BIA.

BIA

Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) is a method for estimating body composition, and in particular body fat. It is a simple test and can tell you the amount of body fat, visceral fat, distribution of body fat and fat free mass reflecting the amount of muscle you have. Eight electrodes BIA like the one we use at sweet clinic gives reasonable estimate of body fat, when compared to more cumbersome methods like MRI and DEXA.

Waist Circumference Measurement

It can help you figure out your overall health risks. If you have most fat around your waist (Apple shaped) then you have higher risk of obesity related health problems.

The cut offs for increased risks are:

• Greater than 35 inches for women
• Greater than 40 inches for men

Nitrogen and Obesity

The evolution of human kind from hunter gatherer with the uncertainty about life and food to a modern mankind with surplus of food is phenomenal.

I would call Nitrogen is the essence of life and the root cause of obesity! Sounds crazy isn’t it? Let’s see.. Atmospheric nitrogen though abundant can’t be used directly by most living creatures including humans. Certain bacteria developed the extraordinary feat of fixing this nitrogen to ammonia which can be used by other forms of life.

Since this conversion is limited (by bacteria in legumes and certain other plants) so was food supply. The problem faced by mankind was one of food scarcity.

The Haber-Bosch process: The key breakthrough was made in 1909 by an ambitious young chemist called Fritz Haber, who demonstrated that he could fix nitrogen from air in a table top experiment. BASF engineers led by Carl Bosch up scaled this process to epic proportions. And today the Haber process produces ~ 500 million tonnes of nitrogen fertilizer per year. Due to its dramatic impact on the human ability to grow food, the Haber process served as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to today's 7 billion. According to Howarth (2008), nearly 80% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process.

The utilisation of nitrogen is inefficient and this has led to garbage both in our ecosystem as well as our bodies. This heavy use of industrial nitrogen fixation is proving severely disruptive to our biological habitat (e.g. Algal bloom, effluents) as well as our bodies (Obesity, diabetes and related pandemic).

From letting nitrogen alone being an inert gas in our atmosphere to fixing it for fertilizers to make life or taking life (making bombs) mankind seems to be bringing the worst (?best) out of this element.