There is no worse harbinger of what's to come. With too many calories in or too few out, the body has little choice but to stockpile fat. While piling up fat is often considered a cosmetic problem, obesity is even more of a health problem. In a world without obesity, a large portion of heart disease and cancer would disappear. Experts believe that excess body fat accounts for more than 80 percent of the cases of type II diabetes.
Obesity also raises the risk of gallstones, arthritis and a host of other conditions.
And obesity is a family-finance problem. Amid the financial and health costs are the psychological costs borne by overweight members of a society obsessed with the slender bodies peering out from magazine covers. Doctors as far back as ancient Greece have known that people become overweight when they consume more calories than they burn. But a person's eating and exercise patterns are extremely difficult behaviors to measure. Teenagers take in about 9 percent of their calories from soft drinks.