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An Ethical Assessment of Dieting, Weight Loss, and Weight Cycling

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Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics
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Synonyms

Antiobesity medication; Bariatric surgery; Slimming; Slimming diets; Weight reduction

Introduction

Overweight and obesity, a moderate to severe accumulation of excessive fat in the body, result from an imbalance between calorie intake and expenditure, leading to an increased risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Emerging on an epidemic scale in the second half of the twentieth century, the problem of overweight and obesity with an increasing global prevalence resulted in 0.5 billion obese and 1.4 billion overweight adults in 2008 (WHO 2013) due to sedentary lifestyle and the changing foodstuffs and food trends and eating habits.

What has happened to our food? In the developed regions of the world, with the United States as the most prominent, it has become abundant, thanks to the improvements in agricultural production, and it has become diversified; higher in sugar, salt, and fat; and thus more tasteful due to the improvements in food processing industry....

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Correspondence to Hakan Ertin .

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Ertin, H., Temel, M.K. (2013). An Ethical Assessment of Dieting, Weight Loss, and Weight Cycling. In: Thompson, P., Kaplan, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_159-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_159-1

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