Mission: Readiness, an organization composed of retired admirals and generals, recently reported that an alarming 75 percent of all young adults aged 17 to 24 are not qualified to join the military.

Many young adults are not eligible to become men in uniform because they either fail to graduate from high school or have criminal records. But the MAIN reason is obesity.

Child obesity rates have more than tripled in the past three decades. Now, one in three children, 10 to 17, is overweight or obese; and 27 percent of young adults, 17 to 24, are too heavy to join the services.

As a result, roughly 15,000 prospective recruits flunk the physical entrance exam because they are too overweight.

Dr. Joseph Mercola believes that fructose, a cheap sugar commonly used in processed food products and soft drinks, is one of the culprits in the obesity epidemic, both in children and adults.

Today, more than 50 percent of manufactured foods and beverages are sweetened using fructose in the form of high fructose corn syrup. This sweetener is found in soda, the number one source of calories in America.

How Fructose is Making Americans Fat

Every cell in your body uses glucose or blood sugar, Dr. Mercola explains. Glucose is immediately burned up immediately after you consume it. When you eat 120 calories of sugar in the form of glucose, less than one calorie is stored as fat.

But fructose is a completely different story. Consuming fructose is essentially consuming fat, Mercola warns. Your body converts fructose into free fatty acids, LDL (the damaging form of cholesterol), and triglycerides, which get stored as fat. Consuming 120 calories of sugar in the form of fructose means you store 40 calories as fat!

Studies show that soda and sugar-sweetened drinks increase the risk of obesity in children. And because high fructose corn syrup is also found in many processed foods, that further increases the chances of your children regularly consuming this dangerous sugar.

Why Kids Should Not Consume High Fructose Corn Syrup

Studies and estimates show that:

• Obese children are more than twice as likely to die before the age of 55 than children with a healthy weight
• Obese teenage girls are more likely to die between ages 36-56 than their normal weight peers
• Moderately obese teen girls increase their risk of death in adulthood by 50 percent
• Obese teens more than double their mortality risks compared to their slimmest peers

Yes, having more obese children and young adults may affect the military’s recruitment in the long run but more importantly, as they mature, obesity is exposing them to diseases like cancer, diabetes and heart disease, robbing them of a chance to live healthy and happy lives.

As a Parent, What Can You Do About It?

Changing your lifestyle will help you and your family achieve your ideal weights. You should keep your fructose consumption to under 25 grams per day by avoiding fructose-rich fruits, fruit juices and soda.

Check what your kids are eating at the school cafeteria. Better yet, prepare their meals at home so you can be sure that they’ll be eating healthy even when they’re at school.

Exercising as a family is also a step to the right direction. You can go for walks, bike rides, teach them how to swim or skate, the activities are only limited by your imagination. Limit their time in front of the television and playing videogames because a sedentary lifestyle compounds obesity woes.

A new study conducted at the University of Nottingham Schools of Graduate Entry Medicine and Biomedical Sciences showed that it gets harder for people aged over 65 to suppress muscle wasting or breakdown.

When older people eat, their ability to build muscle with the protein they consume is hampered and the insulin in their bodies fail to prevent the muscle wasting that occurs overnight and between meals.

A follow-up study showed that poor blood flow may be an important factor because it prevents the optimal delivery of hormones and nutrients to the muscles.

Researchers discovered that regular weight training helps rejuvenate blood flow to the extremities of people in their late 60s, to the point that they were almost identical to those of 25-year-olds.

Osteopathic physician Dr. Joseph Mercola believes that exercise, including weight training, is a natural remedy for poor blood circulation. Many exercisers, however, give little or no time for weight training because they think it’s too strenuous and will cause them to “bulk up.”

But weight training isn’t about looking like an underwear model. Weight-bearing exercises can help produce beneficial changes in your body, on the chemical, enzymatic, hormonal and molecular levels. These changes will help prevent or slow down many diseases caused by a sedentary lifestyle, such as diabetes, heart disease, muscle wasting and osteoporosis, Dr. Mercola explains.

So unless you plan to be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger, there’s no need to worry about overly bulking up when you do weights.

When you gain more muscle, you’re also burning more calories, which are consumed even when you are at rest or asleep, and this helps you get rid of body fat.

Weight training does more than tone your muscles and induces weight loss. Weight-bearing exercises are among the most effective treatment strategies against osteoporosis. Taking drugs to improve your bone density is a big no-no for Dr. Mercola, because this is more likely to give you more harm in the long run.

Your bones become more brittle as you age, especially if you’re leading a sedentary lifestyle. Resistance training can help prevent this effect because putting more tension on your muscles also applies more pressure on your bones, which then react by creating fresh, new bone. Also, as you put on more muscle and strengthen your existing mass, you’re also applying constant pressure to your bones.

Weight lifting can also help reduce your risk of diabetes and heart disease by lowering inflammation in your body to help keep off visceral fat (commonly known as belly fat), which is deposited in your abdomen to surround your vital organs. Visceral fat has been linked to serious chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke, among many other chronic diseases.

Exercise can provide you with an assortment of health benefits but it is just one component of a healthy lifestyle. To fully experience the benefits of exercise, you should also start eating healthy and managing your stress levels.

Most kidney stones are easily eliminated from the body. A small stone may be excreted without causing too much pain. However, a large kidney stone can get stuck in a ureter, the bladder or the urethra, blocking the flow of urine and causing:

• Pain in the side, lower back or groin area lasting between 20 minutes to an hour
• Bloody, cloudy or foul-smelling urine • Nausea and vomiting
• Pain in urination
• Persistent urge to urinate
• Fever and chills

Almost one million Americans develop kidney stones annually. Men are four times more likely to suffer from kidney stones than women. People living in the southern part of the U.S., where the climate is hot, have an increased risk of forming kidney stones since they can get dehydrated, causing their urine to become more concentrated.

Heredity can also increase your risk. The younger you are when you form kidney stones, the greater your risk of recurrence. Once a person has experienced a kidney stone attack, the chances of a recurrence are between 70 to 80 percent.

Dr. Mercola explains that the rising cases of kidney stones among adults and children alike are the side effect of our modern eating habits. Different types of kidney stones are formed depending on the highest concentrations of substances in your urine, like calcium oxalate, which comes from eating too much dark green vegetables, nuts and chocolate.

A diet high in sugar and high fructose corn syrup interferes with the calcium and mineral absorption in your body. A study showed that drinking soda worsens conditions in the urine that contributes to the formation of calcium oxalate kidney stones.

Eating too much processed salt from processed foods and sports drinks are also blamed for increasing the risk of kidney stones in children.

A sedentary lifestyle, high blood pressure, the consumption of soy and caffeine, and taking certain drugs such as Lasix (furosemide), Topomax (topiramate), and Xenical, have also been associated with the formation of kidney stones.

Kidney stones should not be taken for granted because they can be a lifelong problem and can lead to serious kidney damage. Thankfully, making simple lifestyle changes will greatly help you avoid suffering from a painful kidney stone episode:

• Drink a lot of water – The safest and simplest way to treat a kidney stone is to let it pass on its own. Drinking plenty of water will help dissolve kidney stones by decreasing the concentration of solids in the urine. Teach your children the benefits of drinking water. Avoid tea because it’s high in oxalates
• Eat according to your Nutritional Type.
• Eat foods rich in magnesium and vitamin B6, which help prevent the formation of kidney stones.
• Limit your intake of sugar, caffeine, excess salt and processed foods.
• Exercise to keep your body’s fluids circulating.
• Avoid taking prescription drugs.

If you’re suffering intolerable pain from a kidney stone attack, herbs like nettle leaf, bearberry, cleavers, corn silk, crampbark, gravel root, kava kava, khella, hydrangea, stone root may help relieve the symptoms. But remember: consult a natural health physician or an expert herbalist before trying any herbal products

You’re leading a sedentary lifestyle if you’re being a couch potato or remaining inactive most of the time with little or no exercise.

A new study featured in Clinical Cardiology showed that morbidly obese individuals (those with body mass indexes between 40 and 49.9) were sedentary for more than 99 percent of the day. They also walked less than 2,500 steps daily, way below the recommended 10,000 steps for healthy living.

A precise body sensor was attached to the participants and was used to measure physical activity, caloric expenditure and minute-by-minute movement over a 72-hour period within their homes.

After the data was collected, a structured cardiorespiratory fitness testing was performed on each subject and most of the morbidly obese participants in the study were markedly sedentary. They spend 23 hours and 51.6 minutes on average per day sleeping or engaged in sedentary activity and the remaining 8.4 minutes were spent in moderate activity.

These findings aren’t really surprising. For the longest time, Americans have been eating much of the same stuff everyday – processed foods and fast foods – but have been doing very little exercise to burn those unwanted calories.

Modern living has contributed to sedentary lifestyle obesity. The satellite TV and remote control, the car wash, the dishwasher, Internet, etc rob you of the time you could have spent on physical activity and contribute to your risk of obesity.

For the record, obesity has been linked to five of the top 10 diseases with the highest mortality rates:

• cardiovascular disease
• stroke
• diabetes
• hypertension, and
• cancer

You don’t necessarily need to join a gym or engage in vigorous physical activity to start burning some calories. You can start by doing non-exercise activities like folding laundry, washing the dishes, mowing the lawn or taking the stairs instead of the elevator.

Light amounts of physical activity and exercise may yield significant health benefits. Over time, as you increase your amounts of light physical activity, you will also increase your aerobic capacity and ultimately, reduce mortality.

Whichever way you look at it, there’s no reason not to move around, sweat it out and exercise. Your body is designed for movement. Unlike a car, the more you move, the healthier your body gets.

When you move your muscles, ligaments and limbs, you’re actually massaging your tissues and organs, bringing them oxygen and nutrients and enhancing their flexibility. You also move lymph fluid around your body (you can’t pump your lymph fluid if you don’t move).

Exercise also makes you sweat and flush out the toxins in your body and encourages you to replace the lost fluid by drinking pure water. Outdoor physical activities also provide you with the benefits of sunlight and vitamin D, a very important nutrient which most Americans are deficient in.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to the obesity epidemic but you always have a choice. Don’t be a victim of the sedentary lifestyle disease. It’s not too late to take control of your health.