USA TODAY

Letter to the editor:

Accepting being tall or short, black or white, young or old is admirable, but you are doing your readers a great disservice if you don’t point out the serious medical dangers of being overweight or obese.

This is not “just” a cosmetic issue to be accepted and even embraced. The American Medical Association has determined obesity to be a disease (thus, insurance companies often cover its treatment, including life-saving surgery for the morbidly obese), and we now know truly deadly consequences can ensue.

Seventy-one percent of adult Americans are overweight or obese — more are obese than “merely” overweight — and even higher among African Americans and Hispanics. More troublesome is the fact that approximately 17% of children and adolescents are obese. Millions of dollars, if not billions, are spent yearly on obesity-related health problems, rising every year as obesity increases, which our country cannot continue to afford. This is a crisis on both health and financial fronts!

Policing the USA

These are some of the diseases associated with obesity: high blood pressure, cholesterol and triglycerides (blood fats); chronic diseases like osteoarthritis, liver and kidney disease; Type II diabetes; coronary artery disease and stroke; gall bladder disease; sleep apnea; several cancers (including breast and female-specific uterine, endometrial and ovarian); gynecologic problems like infertility; mental illness; the condition known as “metabolic syndrome”; general all-cause mortality; and other problems such as disability, social isolation, quality of life, sexual problems, and lower income and work achievement.

Obesity in America is a crisis, which could arguably be seen as this generation’s “smoking.” Please do not treat it as trivial, or as a body image to be accepted and even celebrated.

Nancy Coates, M.D.; Mission, Kansas