Sample Essays - Health Essays
Discuss what happens to an individual of a normal weight when they adopt a poor diet and sedentary lifestyle.
In general terms, an individual's weight is a balance between the amount of calories consumed and absorbed in their diet and the amount of calories burned up in the processes of respiration and exercise. If more calories are consumed than utilised, then the balance will get stored in the body, primarily as fat. (French et al. 2001) This is, of course, a great oversimplification of an enormously complex process but it is the guiding principle behind the thrust of this essay.
Considerations relating to diet and health have taken up many volumes in many textbooks and we therefore do not presume to cover the whole area in one essay, but we hope to focus in on some of the main principles the same considerations apply to exercise and health.
What evidence is there to link exercise (or the lack of it) with a state of health? The paper by Miller et al. (1997) is a good starting point. It provides a meta-analysis of over 50 studies which point to a lowering of the risk of cardiovascular disease in active individuals and 43 more studies which show an approximate doubling of cardiovascular risk in inactive subjects.
A poor diet and a sedentary life style has been statistically implicated in what Lees and Booth (2004) call Sedentary death syndrome . This reflects the correlation between poor diet, a sedentary lifestyle and a reduction in health generally.
The converse is also demonstrable. Exercise has been shown to reduce the statistical incidence of specific disease processes (AHA 1996). A particularly elegant and well constructed twin study (Kujala et al. 1998) demonstrated the relationship between physical activity rates and premature death. It can also be demonstrated that regular exercise and obesity control can reduce the risk of developing Type II diabetes mellitus to almost nil. (AHA 1999). Other studies can point to the reduction of cancer rates in associated with exercise (Hakim et al 1998)
What evidence is there to link a poor diet to physiological and health changes? One of the major dietary factors that is related to ill health is the issue of cholesterol. (Han et al. 1998) This is also a massive topic, but in broad terms a high fat diet tends to be reflected in a high cholesterol level, which, in turn, is positively correlated with an increase in cardiovascular disease incidence (AHA 2004). This is mediated by a change in the balance in the LDL and HDL fractions of lipoprotein transport mechanisms in the blood.
James (et al. 1997) point to many dietary factors that impinge on health. Reduction in anti-oxidant intake (Duthie et al.2003) is associated with a reduction in the DNA repair capacity of the body. A reduction in vitamin intake can result in a multitude of different health issues (Chandra 2002) (El-Kadiki et al.2005)
We can point to a number of physiological changes in the body which occur as a result of both a sedentary life style and dietary change. Obesity, as an independent variable, will produce changes that result in appetite reduction, (Dulloo et al. 1997) and increased fat oxidation (Leibel et al 1995). Increased weight will result in increased energy expenditure (Blundell et al 2001). It can also be demonstrated that obesity is associated with insulin resistance, increased activity of the sympathetic nervous system and increases in leptin concentrations (Swinburn et al. 2002)
In broad terms our eponymous subject would be very poorly advised to adopt the changes that he has in terms of long term health, he would be very much better advised to keep his weight down and his exercise levels up.
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References
AHA Scientific Position Statement: 1996 Statement on Exercise (1996) Circulation. 1996;94:857-862
AHA Scientific Statement 1999 Diabetes and Cardiovascular Disease, (1999) Circulation. 1999;100:1134-1146
AHA 2004 American heart association: Bulletin Jan 2004
Blundell JE, Gillett A. 2001 Control of food intake in the obese. Obes Res 2001;9(suppl 4): 263S-270S.
Chandra RK. 2002 Effect of vitamin and trace-element supplementation on immune responses and infection in elderly subjects. Lancet 2002;340:1124-7.
Dulloo AG, Jacquet J, Girardier L. 1997 Poststarvation hyperphagia and body fat overshooting in humans: a role for feedback signals from lean and fat tissues. Am J Clin Nutr 1997;65: 717-23.
Duthie GG, Arthur JR, Beattie JAG, Brown KM, Morrice, PC, Robertson JD, et al. 2003
Cigarette smoking, antioxidants, lipid peroxidation, and coronary heart disease. Ann N Y Acad Sci 2003;686:120-9.
El-Kadiki and Alexander J Sutton 2005 Role of multivitamins and mineral supplements in preventing infections in elderly people: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials BMJ, Apr 2005; 330: 871
French SA, Story M, Jeffery RW. 2001Environmental influences on eating and physical activity. Annu Rev PublicHealth2001;22: 309-35
Hakim, H Petrovitch, CM Burchfield et al. (1998) Effects of Walking on mortality among non-smoking retired men. New England Journal of Medicine 1998 338: 94-9.
Han TS, Tijhuis MA, Lean ME, Seidell JC. 1998 Quality of life in relation to overweight and body fat distribution. Am J Public Health 1998;88: 1814-20
James, Nelson, Ann Ralph, and Suzi Leather 1997 Socioeconomic determinants of health: The contribution of nutrition to inequalities in health BMJ, May 1997; 314: 1545.
Kujala, J Kaprio, S Sarna, M Koskenvuo. (1998) Relationship between leisure-time physical activity and mortality. The Finnish twin cohort. JAMA 1998 279: 440-4.
Lees & Booth (2004) Sedentary Death Syndrome Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology Volume: 29; Issue: 4; August, 2004
Leibel RL, Rosenbaum M, Hirsch J. 1995 Changes in energy expenditure resulting from altered body weight. N Engl J Med 1995;332: 621-8.
Miller et al. (1997) Exercise and its role in the prevention and rehabilitation of cardiovascular disease. Annals of Behavioral Medicine 1997 3: 220-229.
Swinburn B, Egger G. 2002 Preventive strategies against weight gain and obesity. Obes Rev 2002;3: 289-301
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