Rethinking Weight By Amanda Spake Summary

Amanda Spake, senior writer for the magazine US News and World Report, wrote an article, “Rethinking Weight,” that discusses whether society should classify obesity, or being overweight, as a “disease.” Spake begins her article with a story about Maria Pfisterer. Spake says that Maria has always been a little plump. As a mother of three, Maria never thin, she was her thinnest at 18. She would very often lose her weight by taking prescribed-drugs, low-calorie diets, and weight-loss programs such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig, but then she would also gain the weight back almost immediately due to a pregnancy or because of something natural. Maria is not the only person who experiences these problems. Maria, her sister, her daughter Jordan, along with 64 percent of Americans are fighting to take control of their weight before something dangerous to their health happens. The most important aspect of the obesity situation is whether or not to identify obesity as a disease in the line of cancer or heart disease, diseases that can be caused by obesity.

This issue is very important because those

This research revealed that the United States is spending around $75 billion a year on diseases related to obesity, including Type II diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, high cholesterol, gallbladder disease, and osteoarthritis. Researchers agree with the WHO and NIH, along with the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences, and the CDC, who say that obesity is a disease. When speaking to Spake, Yale physcologist says, “The ramifications could be enormous-for opening up better treatments, and to some extent for social attitudes toward people with this problem. When alcoholism was declared a disease, it changed attitudes and reduced the stigma of