cultural psychology of obesity--论文代写范文精选

肥胖是全球流行病。目前超重和肥胖在美国成人和儿童的比例分别为61%和14%的。肥胖成年人自1980年以来几乎翻了一番,从1980年的15%到1999年的27%。儿童体重过重在美国迅速上升,尤其是非裔美国人和拉美裔美国人。下面的essay代写范文将继续进行阐述。

Abstract
We examine the accelerating worldwide obesity epidemic using a mathematical model relating a cognitive hypothalamicpituitary-adrenal axis tuned by embedding cultural context to a signal of chronic, structured, psychosocial threat. The obesity epidemic emerges as a distorted physiological image of ratcheting social pathology involving massive, policy-driven, economic and social ‘structural adjustment’ causing increasing individual, family, and community insecurity. The resulting, broadly developmental, disorder, while stratified by expected divisions of class, ethnicity, and culture, is nonetheless relentlessly engulfing even affluent majority populations across the globe.

The progression of analogous epidemics in affluent Western and East Asian societies is particularly noteworthy since these enjoy markedly different cultural structures, known to influence even such fundamental psychophysical phenomena as change blindness. Indeed, until recently population patterns of obesity were quite different for these cultures. We attribute the entrainment of East Asian societies into the obesity epidemic to the diffusion of Western socioeconomic practices whose imposed resource uncertainties and exacerbation of social and economic divisions constitute powerful threat signals. We find that individual-oriented ‘therapeutic’ interventions against obesity will be largely ineffective since the therapeutic process itself (e.g. reliance on drug treatments) embodies the very threats causing the epidemic. Key Words culture, deindustrialization, deurbanization, globalization, hierarchy, information theory, obesity, phase transition, social dominance.

Introduction
Obesity is epidemic across the globe. Current rates of overweight and obesity in the United States are 61% and 14% in adults and children respectively. Obesity in adults has nearly doubled since 1980, from 15% in 1980 to 27% by 1999 (e.g. Wellman and Friedberg, 2002). Childhood overweight is rapidly rising in the US, particularly among African Americans and Hispanics. By 1998 prevalence increased to 21.5% in African Americans, 21.8% among Hispanics, and 12.3% among non-Hispanic whites aged 4 to 12 years (Strauss and Pollack, 2001).

This rapid change in previously non-obese, East Asian populations will be a particular focus of our analysis. The obesity epidemic is associated with serious health conditions including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke, certain types of cancer, hypoxia, sleep apnea, hernia, and arthritis. It is a major cause of economic loss, death, and suffering which shows no indications of abatement. Within the US obesity is unevenly distributed geographically, ethnically, and by socioeconomic class. Urban people of color (Allan, 1998), poor Southern states (Mokdad et al., 1999), and poor neighborhoods within cities (GinsbergFellner et al, 1981) have higher prevalences. The Southern states form the epicenter of the geographically spreading epidemic (Mokdad et al., 1999), a picture of contagion between populations.

Stress and the HPA axis Abdominal obesity and visceral fat accumulation are particularly associated with disease, and have become the focus of much research on ‘stress’ and its relation to the ‘fight-or- flight’ responses of the HPA axis. We paraphrase Bjorntorp (2001), who extensively summarizes the role of the HPA axis in physiological responses to stress. When the input of noxious signals is prolonged, the HPA axis reactivity changes from normal and relatively transient attempts to maintain homeostasis or allostasis with temporary peaks of cortisol secretion, first, to a state of sensitization, which reacts with exaggerated cortisol secretion after a given input. This occurs during the most active phase of the HPA axis, which is the early morning in humans. When repeated too often and with sufficient strength of the input, the first sign of malfunction is a delayed down-winding, so that cortisol secretion stays elevated for a prolonged period of time. Subsequently, the normal diurnal pattern is disrupted, and morning values tend to be lower.

This subsequently develops into a low, steady, rigid diurnal cortisol secretion with little reactivity, a ‘burned out’ HPA. In parallel, the controlling, central glucocorticoid receptors become less efficient, and down-regulated. Further challenges are followed by atrophy of the entire system, often found after long-term, severe hypercortisolaemia as in Cushing’s syndrome, melancholic depression, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the aftermath of war. Bjorntorp (2001) describes how elevation of cortisol is followed by visceral fat accumulation. Much research shows consequent lowered sex steroid and growth hormone secretions have the same consequence, because of the insufficient counteraction against cortisol effects, and the combination of these abnormalities powerfully directs a larger than normal fraction of total body fat to visceral deposits. In sum, increased activity of the HPA axis triggers both inhibition of both the pituitary gonadal and growth hormone axes. Stress may, then, synergistically cause accumulation of visceral fat, via elevated cortisol secretion and decrease of sex steroid and growth hormones.

Discussion and conclusions
Two powerful and intertwining phenomena of socioeconomic disintegration – deurbanization and deindustrialization – have combined to profoundly damage many US communities, dispersing historic accumulations of economic, political, and social capital. These losses have had manifold and persisting impacts on both institutions and individuals (e.g. Pappas, 1989; Ullmann, 1988; D. Wallace and R. Wallace, 1998; Wallace and Wallace, 2005). Elsewhere we examined the effect of these policy-driven phenomena on the hierarchical diffusion of AIDS in the US (Wallace et al., 1999). Wallace and Wallace (2005) extend that work to the association with obesity, in the context of a causal biological model.

By 1980, not a single African-American urban community established before or during World War II remained intact. Many Hispanic urban neighborhoods established after the war suffered similar fates. Virtually all lost considerable housing, population, and economic and social capital either to programs of ‘urban renewal’ in the 1950’s or to policy-related contagious urban decay from the late 1960’s through the late 1970’s (e.g. Wallace and Wallace, 1998; M. Fullilove, 2004).

Wallace and Wallace (2005) examined the relation between obesity, obesity disorders, and both deindustrialization and deurbanization in the US, concluding that cultural change has become a pervasive threat signal, triggering chronic responses in the HPA axis across broad sectors of the population, with effects extending even into affluent and powerful subgroups. The very forces which have caused the collapse of the US industrial base, i.e. the Cold War and its aftermath, have served as market selection pressures on East Asian nations. The overwhelming military power of the US empire, self destructive as it may be in the long term, serves as both example and threat to these ancient and traditional societies, placing them under increasingly acute pressure to adopt employment practices causing widespread resource insecurity. That is, US economic power and imperial military power serve as engines to drive diffusion of pathogenic economic structure and practice into East Asian and other societies. Such stress is critical to the etiology of visceral obesity, the metabolic syndrome, and their pathological sequelae, mediated by the HPA axis and several other physiological subsystems.（essay代写)

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