An often-overlooked element of the obesity discussion is the role of the food industry in shaping unhealthy behaviors. Highly processed, calorie-dense foods, loaded with sugar, bad fats and salt, are heavily marketed and easily accessible. The food industry’s influence extends far beyond individual choices—it manipulates the types of foods available, their affordability, and how appealing they are, making it difficult for many to make healthier decisions.

Feel like you should be drinking less? Start here

More than a billion people are estimated to be living with obesity worldwide and prescription weight-loss drugs are in high demand. Recent estimates put the cost of twelve medicalized conditions, for which medicalization has been documented and cost estimated, at $77.1 billion in annual health care spending, or close to 4 percent of national health care expenditures 3. This figure is greater than the estimated 3 percent spent on public health in 2005 22, raising the question of whether such spending is marijuana addiction appropriate. The finding also focuses attention on whether policies should be put in place to curb the growth, or even decrease the amount, of spending, on medicalized conditions 3. If the time and effort required to engage patients in treatment protocols were reflected in remuneration for doing so, clinicians would be far more likely to do so than they currently are 17. If physicians routinely undertook treatment for obesity, the pharmaceutical industry would be more inclined to develop new and better obesity drugs, and the FDA would come under more pressure to approve them 17.

Enhancing Healthcare Team Outcomes

In 2004, George Bray called obesity a chronic, relapsing neurochemical disease with an etiology and a pathogenesis 27. In doing so, he medicalized it, putting it under the purview of doctors and other health professionals to study, diagnose, prevent, or treat. Recently, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) 25 did likewise, announcing that obesity is not just a condition, but a disease state. Prior to that statement, the group viewed it as “the consequence of consistently poor lifestyle choices” 25. Currently, the subject receives little time or attention in medical schools, and the time it does receive focuses on obesity as a lifestyle issue rather than a physiological problem 17. A greater investment in obesity education would change physicians’ attitudes towards the illness and how it is treated.

Study design and population

This paper discusses similarities between obesity and addictive disorders, including common personality characteristics, disruptive behavior syndromes, and brain mechanisms. Although there are important differences between overeating and other addictive behaviors, an addiction model of overeating may effectively inform prevention and treatment of obesity. Obesity and psychiatric illness are closely linked, and the evidence is strong and reciprocal for depression, modest, and inconsistent for anxiety disorders and inadequate for other psychiatric conditions. Apart from depression, the causal relationships between obesity and other psychiatric disorders could not be established from available data. Although both genders appeared to be at risk of psychiatric disorders in obesity and vice versa, many of these associations were stronger in females indicating a possible moderating role for gender in this relationship. Based on current evidence, there is a need to carry out a cost-effectiveness analysis of a multidisciplinary approach to the management of obesity.

Years from the baseline recruitment to the new onset of the first or the second chronic diseases, the ascertainment of death, or the end of follow-up (1st September 2023), whichever occurred first, were considered the time scale. The proportional hazard assumption was checked using Schoenfeld’s residual methods and no violations were found. Quasi-Poisson mixed effects models were conducted to is alcoholism a mental illness examine the association between PPD and number of new-onset diseases during follow-up. The models were adjusted for number of chronic diseases at baseline in addition to the aforementioned covariates. We used linear mixed model to examine the association between PPD and the cumulative rate of chronic diseases during follow-up by including interactions between follow-up year and PPD as fixed effects, and including random effects for participants and follow-up year. In addition, alcohol may reduce the risk of one condition (such as cardiovascular disease) while increasing the risk of another (such as cancer).

This can be as simple as using your lunch break to take a walk outside or doing some stretching or yoga to start or end your day. Evidence is modest for anxiety disorders and inadequate for other psychiatric conditions. Inconsistent evidence exists regarding the strength, direction, and moderators in the relationship between obesity and psychiatric disorders. More and more, neuroscientists are finding similarities in the pathways that lead to excessive eating and dependence on alcohol and other drugs. Overconsumption can trigger a gradual increase in the reward threshold, requiring more and more palatable high-fat food or reinforcing alcohol to satisfy cravings. Both conditions are occasioned by periods of loss of control, whether that loss of control is the result of a moment of personal weakness, genetics or the environment.

We tried to keep the studies homogeneous with regard to their design and domains of outcome studied so as to render an interpretation of findings easier and that allied with the quality assessment done are advantages of the present review. Furthermore, labelling alcoholism and obesity as diseases can create a sense of inevitability or helplessness. When individuals view their condition as a fixed and uncontrollable disease, they may feel disempowered, which can diminish motivation to engage in self-directed changes such as therapy, lifestyle modifications or healthier habits. This approach can reinforce feelings of hopelessness, as individuals may feel “broken” or defined by their diagnosis. Some people have said that drinking alcohol increases appetite, and so can lead to overeating and weight gain.

• Advances in understanding brain mechanisms of reward may shift the focus to other symptoms, such as loss of control and inability to curtail use.
• That’s why the Surgeon General issued an advisory in January 2025 recommending that alcoholic beverages carry new labels warning of the alcohol-cancer link and highlighting that no safe low level of alcohol consumption has been established.
• An often-overlooked element of the obesity discussion is the role of the food industry in shaping unhealthy behaviors.

• Is the corresponding author, has full access to all the data and has final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.
• Calling people obese is medically “flawed” – and the definition should be split into two, a report from global experts says.
• For others, there are genetic factors that produce a tendency to overweight even with the consumption of what would be for most people an appropriate number of calories.
• While the term “disease” can help raise awareness of the serious health risks these conditions pose, it also introduces significant drawbacks, influencing how people understand and address their behaviours.

This is likely due to the societal pressure placed on women to https://ecosoberhouse.com/ look a certain way, and the stigma attached to being overweight. Men who are overweight may also experience feelings of low self-esteem and poor body image, which can lead to anxiety and depression. Quality assessment of included studies was performed concurrently with data extraction by the two authors independently. The data extracted from the articles include the author and year of study, place of conduct of study, characteristics of the study population, sample size, study design, primary objective, fully adjusted measure of association such as risk (either odds ratio OR/relative risk RR), and any significant moderators/mediators. We used an adapted version of the Newcastle–Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale to critically appraise the selected articles which fell into the category of observational studies.

Medicalization may reduce social discrimination by emphasizing that some of the causes of obesity are outside individual control 8. Inasmuch as discrimination on the basis of disease or disability is considered unacceptable, medicalization may advance the rights of the obese 5. It may also reduce stigma among health care professionals by changing views on etiology 5. Physicians, who often share the negative biases of society as a whole about obese patients 7, 10-12, usually consider the treatment of the causes of illness to be standard medical practice 5, 13.

Our aim as stated above was to identify studies which directly looked into the association between psychiatric illness and obesity. “Psychiatric illness” was defined as any International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Edition coded category between F00 and F99. A supplemental Google Search using random combinations of the above terms was also done to further comb the extant literature. While the term can raise awareness and provide access to crucial healthcare resources, it also risks oversimplifying these complex conditions by focusing too much on their biological aspects.