OBESITY AMONG MALAYSIAN
As we know, obesity is a worldwide disease that has been declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) .Obesity is defined as an excess of adipose or fat tissue that can produce adverse health effects. Obesity now occurs among Malaysians and it is the no.1 ranking of Asian Pacific problem. According to recent statement by the Health Minister Datuk Liow Tiong Lai (2010), overweight and obesity among Malaysians needs urgent attention again illustrates public ignorance on the problem. The Minister pointed out that the prevalence of adult obesity in Malaysia from 1996-2006 had more than tripled with four out of every 10 Malaysians above 18 years of age are now being either overweight or obese. There are several causes of obesity, such as lack of exercises, eating habits and imbalanced diet.Firstly, is the lack of exercise. Malaysians nowadays are too ignoring about healthy lifestyle that plays a significant role on obesity. They are too busy with their work and do not have much time to do some exercise in the evening. Furthermore, they are having their stressful life and as a result, they decide to eat. They also have dinner with their client every day. There are currently at least 60% of the world’s population gets insufficient exercises including Malaysians. In addition, Feasibility Study in Minority Populations unhealthy eating habits, physical exercise and macronutrient intakes are predictors of anthropometric indicators in the Women's Health Trial (Bhargava & Guthrie, 2002). In addition, Malaysians attitudes that are too lazy to have an exercise also make them become obese. They have yet to realize the importance of exercise. Children and adults today spend their time in front of television during their pleasure time. For example, the mass media today has its own attractive program to attract children to watch television in the evening. In other case, parents also do not allow children to play outside, they usually ask them to stay at home and watch television.
Secondly is eating habits. Malaysian’s nowadays like to have dinner after nine in the evening. This is because they are too busy with their work and tend to have late dinner. In their mind, they always think that dinner is less important than breakfast. Besides that, they also have a simple life by taking a lot of instant food. They do not know that instant foods are high in chemical and low in nutrition. Malaysians have yet to realize the importance of nutrition that is 70% of the body needed. Moreover, Malaysians today like to eat hawker food. As usual, they take lunch or dinner or even breakfast outside. There are a lot of calories and besides, the hawker food is not clean (Cassell & Gleaves, 2006).
Thirdly is imbalanced diet. As we know, people are not exposed to the right way to diet. They tend to take the wrong way to diet. While on diet, they tend to eat only bread. Whereas the bread is the best storage of fat and one bun of bread equals to one plate of rice. They also think that water can make people get fat. But, in fact, water is 70% needed by our body, and it is good to have 6 litres of plain water every day to clean our body. Then, lack of protein occurs if the problem is not solved. They are not exposed to the power of cellular nutrition food that is rich in protein.
As a conclusion, there a many factors that causes obesity among Malaysians. We should proud to be Malaysians in peaceful, but, do we know that a large number of Malaysians are suffering their life because of the obesity burden. As a result, we have to focus on the imbalanced diet, eating habits, and lack of exercise as the causes of obesity among Malaysians.
REFERRENCE1. Bhargava, P & Guthrie, M .(2002). Effect of obesity- wikipedia obesity. Retrieved
June 30, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity
2. Cassell, T & Gleaves, N (2006).Diseases causes by obesity. Retrieved July 2,
2011, from http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov.html
3. Kevin, Z. (2010). Overweight among Malaysians. Retrieved July 10,2011,from
