My Own Opinion About Situation Concerning Consuming in The World

In the world where everything is accessible, the world has failed to realize that the human race will lead us all to the destruction of the earth. People have always had basic needs such as food, and shelter. But as society grew wealthier, their appetites changed. They became interested in acquiring things for reasons other than survival. This results in the consumption where humans have made consuming a necessity in their action of outstripping resources available to meet the needs of the world’s demand. Consumerism is a phenomenon that was always inherent in the relatively developed societies, where people purchased goods and consumed resources to the extreme of their needs.

In the current modern world where increasingly cheap and high-calorie food is being prepared in large amounts of ingredients like salt and sugar with the addition of the increasingly sedentary lifestyles as well as increasing of urbanization, there is no doubt that obesity has increased rapidly in the last few decades around the globe.

I want to talk about the statistic of the world obesity where according to the World Health Organization, “Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975 wherein 2016” and “more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight and out of these numbers, over 650 million were obese”. Obesity itself does not only affects the adults but children as well as according to the World Health Organization, “In 2016, an estimated 41 million children under the age of 5 years were overweight or obese. Once considered a high-income country problem, overweight and obesity are now on the rise in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in urban settings. In Africa, the number of overweight children under 5 has increased by nearly 50 percent since 2000. Nearly half of the children under 5 who were overweight or obese in 2016 lived in Asia.”.

This issue impairs the lives of consumers in terms of health. The global health problem of obesity lies in the constant need of one to eat luxuriously rather than eat only what they need. Consumerism can also be blamed for other social ills where the heavy advertising of delicious but unhealthy foods, such as sweets, and fast food has caused a significant rise in diet-related health problems. In the 1990s, for the first time in human history, the world’s population of overweight people was roughly the same as the number of underfed people about 1.1 billion. Obesity can lead to other related diseases, such as cardiovascular disease (mainly stroke and heart diseases) as well as musculoskeletal disorders (especially osteoarthritis which is a highly disabling degenerative disease of the joints in one’s body).

Even with all this being true, obesity is largely preventable as on the individual level, one can decide to start making the choice of a heathier life through the right choices of food to limit to lesser consumption of sugar, salts and fats and to change their sedentary lifestyle to become an active one through engaging actively in physical activity. As for businesses who play a significant role in the food industry, they can firstly restrict the marketing of foods high in sugar and salts and perhaps promote healthier choices to the public. Secondly the businesses should ensure that their industry provides the availability of nutritious and healthy choices for the consumers to afford.

Consumerism also impairs the world we live in. By keeping up with our materialistic wants, we are slowly killing the environment. As consumerism continues to accelerate climate change in a warming world, we will see many impacts to the established agricultural system that we have today since most of our food is developed under stable climate conditions. The average American throws away approximately 185 pounds of plastic per year, 50 percent of the plastic used just once before being discarded. Over the last 10 years, more plastics has been produced than in the entire last century and enough is discarded each year to circle the earth four times. Another direct impact our actions affects the living creatures seriously where 1 million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals are killed every year from plastic in the oceans, and 93 percent of Americans age six or older test positive for the plastic chemical, The United Nations also reports that 3.3 million premature deaths per year are from air pollution caused by the production of consumerism.

Landfills are full of cheap discarded products that fail early and cannot be repaired. Products are made psychologically obsolete long before they actually become worn out. Over 220 Billion cans, bottles, plastic cartons and paper cups, are thrown away each year in the “developed” world (“Ideas and shared solutions for sustainable & low cost green living” ).

As reported by National Geographic News, almost 1.7 billion people worldwide are now part of the “consumer class” (National Geographic refers to them as “the group of people characterized by diets of highly processed food, desire for bigger houses, more and bigger cars, higher levels of debt, and lifestyles devoted to the accumulation of non-essential goods”). And the disturbing fact is that this number grows. What for years was considered a pain of the Western countries is now spreading in the third world - half of global consumers live in developing countries, including 240 million in China and 120 million in India - and they are markets with the most potential for expansion (Mayell).

Christopher Flavin, president of Worldwatch Institute said in a statement to the press, that “Rising consumption has helped meet basic needs and create jobs but as we enter a new century, this unprecedented consumer appetite is undermining the natural systems we all depend on, and making it even harder for the world’s poor to meet their basic needs”. China is a great example of changing realities. Only 25 years ago there were almost no private cars and cities were crowded with bicycles. By 2000, 5 million cars moved people and goods; the number was expected to reach 24 million by the end of 2005 year. In the US, there are more cars on the roads than licensed drivers (“Ideas and shared solutions for sustainable & low cost green living” ).