The Growing Problem with Obesity One of the biggest health problems that face America’s is the increasing number of obese people. Obesity has surpassed smoking as the number one cause of health risks in America. With the number of obese people growing by the day something has to be done soon. Many people know and understand that alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs are bad for us and should not be used, but few people know or realize that food could be just as damaging. Food is just like water, we need it to survive, but if it is used in excess it could be very damaging or deadly to the human body. America and the world have been getting larger and larger over the last thirty to forty years which has lead to health problems and will lead to decrease in life expectancy. So what has caused this shift from normal body fat to excess body fat? Many people believe that the increase in the world’s body fat is due to fast food and lack in exercise. Although these factors may be true there is more to that than one would think. Fast food and possessed foods are a main contributor to excess body fat as Andrew Martin writes in an article “Hardee’s restaurants recently scrapped almost its entire menu to focus on hefty sandwiches called Thickburgers--including the Double Bacon Cheese Thickburger, weighing in at two-thirds of a pound and 1,148 calories” (Martin, 2003, para. 1). This is just one example, of a burger that is more than half the recommended 2000 calories that a person should intake in a day. As “Georgia Guldan, a nutritionist and associate professor at Chinese University's biochemistry department, said: "In general [Hong Kong has] in the past 20 years or so, as have other places around the world with our global food system, gone from a more nutritious traditional wholefood diet to a less nutritious diet with more processed foods (Ho, 2007, para. 8). With