Paper Sample on Cultural Influences on Obesity: Unraveling Eating Habits in the United States

Introduction and Overview of the Problem

Culture engulfs various aspects of people's lives that generally decide every aspect of their lives, including their view of their bodies and how much exercise they decide to get. Culture can include a person's family size and composition, gender, where they live, age, marital status, occupation, and education level. However, culture includes so much more of what can describe a person. However, the above-mentioned can describe a person's culture. For many people, culture has a greater influence on their eating habits than biology and their attitude toward their body weight and food. A person's thinking today may be filled with eating habits that they grew up with, based on cultural, religious, or other cultural practices. These habits range from the types of food that someone prefers, how they choose to prepare them, the type of seasoning they prefer to add, the time of day to eat, and the amount of food to eat. All these attributes may have a great social meaning if someone strongly associates with their culture.

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The cultural norms and ideals in society dictate a person's attitude and view of thinness and fatness. Some groups tend to accept a group of people of a certain heaviness compared to others, and those who are considered heavier are often looked down upon as being obese. For a long time, various cultures have accepted a certain level of body appearance compared to being thin, which is associated with malnourishment. That has often caused a lot of confusion, mostly for people who often want to live in an image preferred by society.

In Europe and the United States, thinness has, over time, shown prowess and remained in style amongst the inhabitants. The value of thinness over heaviness is depicted in the obsession of Americans with weight control and dieting. Even though the medical field does not consider thin as healthy, this is not the case. They tend to focus their energies on looking lean. This prevailing culture of thinness has brought much emphasis on reducing weight and maintaining a certain shape and size. It has brought many self-esteem issues amongst people, which has affected not just how people feel about the appearance of their bodies but also how they are treated in society. Obesity is a well-known problem that is not well-controlled in the United States. For this reason, it is necessary to understand the effects of culture and eating habits on the population's obesity in the United States.

There has been slow growth in the number of obese people in the United States since 1960. This slow growth has eventually ended in doubling the number of obesity rates among American women and men. These statistics were as of 2010 when a national survey was done. The results showed that obesity is indeed a problem that is present in the United States. It has adverse effects in terms of health and social image. The survey revealed that every 3 out of every four adults (which accounted for 75%) were extremely obese, obese, or overweight (Revels et al., 2017).

According to Sogari, G. et al. (2018), this can be viewed as a weight crisis of epidemic proportions. However, the increase in the number of obese persons in the United States can be directly attributed to the poor choice of foods and lack of physical activities, greatly influenced by the change in lifestyle and culture. Society seems to be tolerant of the poor health choices people make in terms of food, physical activities, and leisure time. That is viewed as an evolution amongst the millennials, with the people shunning away from healthy living means. There has been an increase in the number of fast-food joints which experts warn could be deadly for people's health.

The Necessity of the Project

The Project is necessary to review the effects that people's culture and eating habits have on obesity in the United States. That is essential to address the debate among health experts on the effects that weight has on disease. That is due to the inadequate research on the population of overweight people to make a general statement.

Project Purpose Statement

This paper examines the effect that various personal and societal cultures have on obesity in the United States general population. It evaluates the various studies available concerning culture's various eating habits in the United States.

Background and Significance

There has been a steady growth in the number of obese cases in the United States over the last few decades. That can be directly linked to the eating culture that people across the states have. Culture has many effects on how people handle themselves and how they consume their meals. The recent growth in the acceptance of overweight and obese lifestyles in the United States has rendered acceptance of the lifestyle (Swierad et al., 2017). Therefore, it is important to understand the effects of eating habits and culture on the increasing population of obese people. Understanding the culture of various people researchers will enable them to understand that the main cause of obesity is growth or staying around people with a negative culture that allows for bad eating habits. These can be classified into what they eat when they eat it and the quantity of food.

Innovativeness of the Project

The innovativeness of this Project lies in the evaluation of eating habits and how culture affects it. Previous works have displayed bias in addressing only the effect of various out-of-home foods that seem to bring bad oil into the body. This Project is not centered on people getting obese due to the consumption of unhealthy foods but rather goes deeper to analyze the root cause of the craving for these foods. The bottom line of these findings is that people's eating habits are generally affected by their cultural surroundings. Their culture dictates their weight, appetite, the food they consume, the quantity, and quality.

Potential Impact of the Study

The study will pave the way for more researchers to consider putting more emphasis on finding out the relationship between people's culture and their eating habits. This correlation holds the key to understanding the increasing number of obesity cases in the United States. Furthermore, the study seeks to sensitize people more on the importance of physical activity in preventing obesity. Society should embrace more fitness routines to ensure that they stay fit and avoid any risk factors like obesity. The study also seeks to remove the community's thoughts on thinness. The physical appearance of someone does not have a direct link to his/her medical conditions. Modernization has changed people's views on the norms and values about the change in weight and obesity. The Project seeks to explain how the built environment has led to the reduced usage of calories since people do not strain too much thanks to the machines. Due to the reduced usage of calories, there needs to be more time for physical activities.

PICOT Formatted Clinical Project Question

There has been a growth in the number of obese cases of people over the last few decades (P), will the change in culture address the problem (I) compared to the change in eating habits (C) to reduce the growing number of obese people (O) in America for the past 12 months (T)?

Studies have shown that there has been an increasing number of overweight and obese people in the United States. That can be attributed to the growth in acceptance of junk food and not sticking to workout routines. However, despite the various concerns on the causes of the increasing number of obese cases, the leading seems to be tied to a person's culture and their eating habits. It is paramount to explain how I arrived at the question and its importance.

Importance of the Question

This question's importance is in understanding how culture and the people's eating habits in America since it will sensitize as to what actions should be taken in addressing the ever-increasing number of patients. Statistics show how most obese persons in the United States find themselves in that condition due to the cultural environment surrounding them and are lenient with bad eating habits. Society is the group that dictates the habits of people concerning how they relate with others and the type of foods that they intake. For a long time, there was a belief that the thinner the person, the healthier they are. That can not be clinically proven. All persons should keep fat or thin to ensure they cultivate a good culture of eating healthy and working out often.

Literature Review

Guide Used in the Search for Evidence

To determine the best peer-reviewed paper articles, it was essential for the publications to be gauged using a well-defined criterion to convey the specific requirements discussed. The criteria were to be used to eliminate any information sources that may have brought any form of inaccurate or false information.

The first important method considered when choosing the best articles to be used in the search for the evidence was their editorial quality, which happens to play a great role in indicating the quality of each journal. Considering whether there are poor grammar cases, the presence of punctuation errors, and many misspellings is a clear indication of the poor editorial quality of an article. While analyzing the editorial quality, reading through their titles and abstracts, which were used to reveal the article's editorial quality, was equally important. Coming across any title or abstract required to be read twice has been considered a warning sign that such articles are not being used.

Scientific rigor was another key method employed in selecting the articles that highlighted evidence on the effect of culture and eating habits on obesity. These include identifying the purpose of each article's research, its implementation of research design and methods, how the data was analyzed, its results, and the conclusion. During the articles' selection, the measurement of all graphs and figures was also taken to ensure that they were suitable for the study's data. Accuracy of the data is vital in ensuring that information has been correctly used and any data used is correctly represented to give a good representation of results. Accurate information is among the top qualities to be reviewed in the selection of an article.

The journal's reputation was another factor to consider, including the corresponding journal's publisher, purpose, and mission declaration. Most crucially, the society or organization sponsoring every article's publishing led to strong credence to using them in the case study. They proved to be high-quality journals. The research study never included the journals that failed to meet such criteria. A further criterion used in selecting the publications for the study was considering the ethics of the articles. An article chosen for the study had to include approval from the internal review committee, the potential for any conflict of interest, and many other ethical concerns. In the research study, the journals selected for the user had to include the documentation on the journal website regarding ethics and how the different scholars were required to meet this challenge.