THE WORLD'S HEAVIEST PEOPLE

Come let's discuss

Look at the following pictures. You can find brief write-ups about each person. Is it not interesting to read about them? Find out each person's peculiarities. How are they different from normal people? What are the causes that made them die earlier.

THE WORLD'S HEAVIEST PEOPLE

Jon Brower Minnoch (1941-1983) of Bainbridge Island, WA; 6 ft 1 inch estimated as weighing probably more than 1400 lbs in 1979, at which point it took 13 people just to roll him over in bed. Minnoch, like many of the heaviest people, suffered from massive *edema: The former taxi driver had always been unusually heavy, reaching 400 lbs in 1963, 700 lbs in1966, and 975 lbs in 1976. At the time of his death he weighed about 800 lbs. Other details of his physical condition were withheld from the press. Minnoch was the father of two children by his 110-lb wife, Jeannette.

Robert Earl Hughes (1926-1958) of Monticello, 6 ft2 inch, weighed 1069 lbs in February, 1958. Hughes began life at a healthy 1142 lbs, and progressed to 203 lbs at 6 years, 378 lbs at 10, 546 lbs at 13,693 lbs at 18, and 947 at 27. His weight made him a national celebrity: even his custom-made blue jeans made news. At his peak he claimed a chest width of 124 inches and a 122 inch waistline. His untimely death was due to kidney failure.

HOW NOT TO BE OVERWEIGHT

Dr Christian Bernard

Being overweight is perhaps the biggest single health problem among middle-income groups all over the world. On an average, over 50 per cent of the adults in the developed countries of the world are overweight.

Excess Food, Not glands, Adds Weight

There is a close relationship between the amount of food eaten, specially starchy, sugary and fatty food and obesity. Being overweight is not normally the question of glands or heredity. It is almost entirely a question of eating too much of the wrong type of food. An interesting experiment was carried out by Mc Lay of Cornell University, in which one group of mice were allowed to eat as much as they wanted and another group had a very restricted diet. McLay found that the group of mice that were underfed lived twice as long and were far more active than the ones that were overfed. This important experiment has a great lesson for human beings.

Obesity begins from the time one is a baby. Most parents

love a fat chubby baby, with the result that they grossly overfeed their children. So the risk of a coronary attack begins from childhood. The chubby child whom many parents are so proud of, often becomes a heart-case later on in life. The eating habits formed in childhood continue for the rest of one's life, with the result that by the time the infant has reached the age of 15, he is well on the way to having a weight problem when he becomes an adult.

Surprisingly, even a small amount of excess food can make one put on weight. It is a matter of simple arithmetic. Calories make one put on weight. Movement and exercise take off weight. If the calories coming in by way of food are in excess of the calories going out by way of movement and exercise, the calories become stored in our body as fat, and obesity begins. Even a little excess mounts up and in the course of time the result is substantial overweight.

Obesity is also a matter of one's luck and metabolism. Some people eat and drink enormous quantities of calories and yet never put on weight. Their bodies seem to burn up these calories. Yet, there are other people, unfortunately the majority who even if they eat a little excess food, have an increase in weight.

 

Measurement of Food:

Food has a useful unit of measurement: a calorie. All food can be measured in terms of calories.

A calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree centigrade. A thick slice of bread, for example, contains nearly 100 calories. 100 calories is also the energy requirement of a human being for walking four miles at a brisk pace of 4 mph.

How One Puts On Weight

Overeating is a compensatory mechanism in some individuals: it is to obtain self-satisfaction when they are frustrated, bored or under emotional strain. After the age of 40, one's appetite is as good as it has always been, but the body's food requirements become smaller and smaller as one does not exercise as much; yet the intake of food is the same as before because the appetite is the same. And so the spread begins.

How To Reduce Weight

No matter how hard you exercise, you will never bring down your weight substantially by exercising alone. You must jog for a mile or walk hard for four miles to be able to eliminate the effect of only one slice of bread. This gives you an idea of what little effect exercise can have for bringing down weight.

A professor at the University of Michigan (Read it as Mishigan) had to treat a patient who weighed 570 pounds. The patient was put in a hospital room and fed mainly on lettuce -- nothing else. The patient took no exercise. In a relatively short time his weight came down to 170 pounds. This just goes to show the very close relationship between being over weight and the food one eats.

The only way in which one can reduce one's weight effectively is to control one's diet. The calories which he takes in by way of food must be less that the calories which one expends by way of movement and exercise.

From All About Health.

About the author

Dr Christian Bernard, the famous heart surgeon was born in 1922. He became the Head of the Department of Cardiac Research and Surgery at the University Cape Town in South Africa. Dr Bernard performed the first successful open-heart operation. He also performed the first successful heart transplant operation in the world in 1967. He died in 2001.

In his autobiography, One Life, he describes many crucial heart operations he had done in his life.