Obesity in Singapore

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The world is on a rising trend of obesity. A search on Google reveals much information and articles addressing rising obesity rates, in particularly United States, where more than one-third of the adult population is obese. These numbers raises eyebrows, and it is not only the Americans that are overweight, there are also trends in other parts of the world depicting the same issue of obesity. While Singapore’s obesity numbers are barely alarming, obesity rates are on the rise, as said by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (Grant, 2012), and as one of the fastest developing countries in the world, rising obesity numbers in coming years seem inevitable, but the numbers will not be as astronomical as the rest of the world. Singapore is renowned for variety of food, from Chinese, Malay, Indian, Japanese, Korean, etc. One noteworthy point is the amount of fast food restaurants available in Singapore, in particularly McDonald’s. A physical count on the number of the famous fast food chain outlets on their official website goes to 128, and there are already 3 outlets within 1km where I reside alone. To top this off, McDonald’s is only one of the many fast food chains in Singapore, not to mention the many food courts and hawker centres that we have. As a result, about 60% of Singaporeans dine out at least four times or more a week (Grant, 2012), and people are increasingly eating unhealthy food. With more food choices and fatty foods at our convenience, people are likely to gain more weight rapidly and at risk more being obese. Obesity is one of the factors in pushing up risks of diabetes, which leads to other diseases like stroke, heart diseases, and even blindness (Khalik, 2012). The government is aware of the rising numbers, and there have been various measures in different environments, trying to change the numbers by the Health Promotional Board. One program that took

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