Healthy Living: Overweight, Genetics, and Lifestyle

For some people healthy living is just an illusion. For me it means a lot, how I look, which things and activities I can do in my life and what other people think about me. For me healthy living is to eat well, like have three meals each day and not to eat fast food. The exercising is really important too. Teenagers should make at least one hour exercising each day. And I don’t prefer to eat snacks all day long.

Well what can be done to prevent and lower the percent of fat and overweighed teenagers? I watched this program in the TV a long time ago, it was about a school in USA who really done all what they could, to prevent and lower that their pupils should be overweighed. For example they had at least one hour gymnastic every day. They didn’t eat fast food to lunch; they got some really healthy food from the school canteen and a lot of vegetables. A school director from Denmark said that we couldn’t allow one hour or more gymnastic in the Danish schools every day, but that they would work with the food in the schools.

Overweight is controlled by your genes, for some months ago a company donated 60 million Danish crowns to a project for studying genes. They made an investigation with about 40 people; they should eat fast food every day for two months. The results was clear, about the half of them had got the “overweight symptoms” and beginning of the lifestyle sickness like diabetes type 2 and cardiovascular disease. The other 20 young men didn’t develop any overweight or any of the lifestyle sicknesses above. This leads me to my next point, what makes some people heavy overweighed but doesn’t make other gain a single pound? The answer may look simple but is way more complicated than you think. As we all know it got something to do with the metabolism and what blood type we got, like if you got blood type “o” it means that you get more fat then other people from, for an example eating white bread. It all got something to do with the genes we have got from our mother and father and their mother and father and so on. As I have explained earlier, Danish scientists is trying to “remove” some of these genes from lab animals like rats, but so far they haven’t reach any conclusions other then, that most of the genes that gives high metabolism have a good side too, like being an anti cancer gene.