Could you please check my essay on obesitas?

I have to write an essay on obesitas. Could you please check it on grammatical errors, tenses, spelling, sentence structure, coherence,..? Thank you very much!

IS OBESITAS REALLY SUCH A BIG PROBLEM?

Each day, we are astounded by newspaper reports and columns that claim that people are getting too fat. An estimated 8% of the European population dies untimely or isn't steady on its legs anymore.

It is a hopeless task to calculate what overweight costs to the community. In 1998, British scientists made a good attempt and the result of their research was quite alarming: obesitas causes 18 million days of working disability and 30,000 deaths. That amounts to 740 million euro a year. Indeed, overweight sets the nation's economy back.

In our modern consumption society, people have such a wide choice of food, including a large amount of fast food. By eating too much of this unhealthy food, they are more likely to get horrible disorders (e.g. heart attacks, high blood pressure, diabetes, and even some sorts of cancer) later on in their lives. More often than not we tend to forget that healthy food makes healthy people. Obviously, there's no way of banishing that kind of food out of our life, but we have to learn to eat well-balanced.

Moreover, overweight individuals also make global warming worse. According to Dr Phil Edwards, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, food production has a great deal in the CO2 emissions that contribute to global warming. As overweight people eat more food, they're a key factor in global warming.

A more frightening idea is that obesitas spreads by contagion. Christakis and Fowler (along with other researchers) have proved that if your friend's friend's friend - even though you've never met him - gains weight, you're likely to gain weight, too. And if, on the contrary, your friend's friend's friend loses weight, there's a fair chance that you will lose weight, too. To put it briefly: if you are associated with obese people, you are in danger of becoming overweight.

Overweight and obesitas constitute a major problem: it undermines our social life, our health, and indirectly also our economy. We ought to do a lot more to cure this disease of the 21th century. Everybody shares the responsibility to undertake action: food industry, health services, government and certainly those who are suffering from obesitas will have to reverse the trend towards a 'fat society'.