Obesity is becoming a global epidemic in both children and adults, and it clearly is an independent risk factor for heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke, included under the classification of cardiovascular diseases. Obesity is defined as excess body fat, and it is not simply excess body weight. Not all excess fat is harmful, and the fat in the lower body found in women may actually have beneficial effects. Upper body fat in men and women causes a systemic inflammation where the effects of excess fat tissue are felt throughout the body and in the cardiovascular system, which comprises the heart and all of the blood vessels in the body, including those in the brain.

Over the past 50,000 years of mankind's existence, malnutrition ...