1 I. Introduction

In December of 2001, the Surgeon General issued a “call to action” advising that obesity was a serious threat to the health of the nation. This call was based on 1999 statistics that suggested that 61% of adults in the United States were overweight (Body Mass Index > 25). Based on these statistics, it was estimated that there were approximately 300,000 obesity-associated deaths each year and that the direct and indirect cost of obesity was about $117 billion dollars per year (for comparison, the U of I’s total state appropriation in 2013 is ∼$220 million/year) . . . and now the bad news . . . according to the most recent data, as reported on the Center for Disease Control website, the situation is only getting worse!

Now you may be wondering, “Where does chemistry fit into all of this?” Consider for a moment the graphic on the following page from the Surgeon General’s call to action.

From this figure, it is easy to appreciate that the problem of obesity is a problem of “energy balance”, and energy balance, almost by definition, involves thermodynamics and thermochemistry. In this laboratory Topic 7, you will be investigating applications of thermodynamics and thermochemistry to topics in food and exercise science in order to reveal some of the important chemical facts pertaining to obesity in the United States.