HEALTH GUIDE

The era of communicable diseases is not over. Changes in lifestyle associated with the growing movement of populations into urban areas, they brought a new face on the situation of health: chronic noncommunicable diseases.

These diseases share several characteristics:

• Source associated with the lifestyle.
• Evolve gradually over time
• Many times the first manifestation corresponds to the sharpening of some of the problems that accompany
• Several of them act as constraints or other flattering
• All take advantage of the same measures
  

The group of non-communicable chronic diseases including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases including stroke, hypertension, cancer and joint problems.

Obesity
Obesity, defined as excess body fat and excess exceeding 20% of desirable weight, represents the common denominator on which can be developed or encouraged any of these diseases. You can do so directly through their own mechanisms and indirectly by creating conditions for other diseases exacerbated their problems.
Beyond the volume of total body fat, which by itself represents a risk factor, the way they distributed in the body can increase that risk, as with abdominal fat. Among these reported a higher frequency of cases of hypertension, diabetes and stroke at early ages.

Cardiovascular Disease
Although the risk of heart disease is higher in men than in women before age 50, the aforementioned accumulation of fat in the abdomen may be able to get rid of that difference.

Hypertension
The association of obesity with hypertension is so obvious that there is work that shows that up to one third of cases of this disease show a significant overweight, with the ratio even higher in youth. There is evidence that weight reduction promotes progressive decrease in blood pressure.

Cancer
Obese women have a significantly higher risk to suffer from malignant tumors in the breast and uterus, while in men the association is seen with tumors of the large intestine and gallbladder. This association can be observed even with moderate increases in the fat deposits.

Diabetes
10 times is observed among those with moderate obesity in the population that has a normal body size. And this percentage increases proportionally with fat.

Joint problems
Abnormal levels of uric acid, also increases as do the fat deposits. This fact, coupled with the detrimental effect of excess weight on the spine, hips, knees and ankles, causes obesity is considered one of the factors contributing to joint problems.

All these situations can be prevented and overcome by adopting a healthy lifestyle, a balanced diet, a good level of physical activity and measures to reduce stress.