Abstract

The obesity in the adolescent population has had an alarming increase, being the diet one of the factors that has mainly influenced on this corporal changes. The diet is characterized for a high ingestion of fat, sugar, processed food, all this is stimulated by attractive messages that increase the ingestion. The main objective was to analyze the meaning that obesity has for adolescents in Temuco-Chile. We worked on this research using the technique of natural semantic nets. We interviewed 372 teenagers who were in first and second years of secondary school. The words that had a highest semantic value in relation to the concept obesity for the students were: fatness, fat, overweight, depression, illness, anxiety, low self-esteem, processed food, sedentary, among others. This sample of students shows that they know about the alterations that go with the obesity. Therefore, it is to say an integrated management of this problem, as well as to be fit or lose weight depending on the situation of each subject. © 2006 Sociedad Chilena de Anatomía.