A new forecast on America’s obesity crisis has health experts fearing a dramatic jump in health care costs if nothing is done to bring the epidemic under control.
The new projection, released Monday, warns that 42% of Americans may end up obese by 2030, and 11% could be severely obese, adding billions of dollars to health care costs.
“If nothing is done (about obesity), it’s going to hinder efforts for health care cost containment,” says Justin Trogdon, a research economist with RTI International, a non-profit research organization in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.
As of 2010, about 36% of adults were obese, which is roughly 30 pounds over a healthy weight, and 6% were severely obese, which is 100 or more pounds over a healthy weight.
“The obesity problem is likely to get much worse without a major public health intervention,” says Eric Finkelstein, a health economist with Duke University Global Health Institute and lead researcher on the new study.
The analysis was presented at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Weight of the Nation” meeting. The study is being published online in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The increase in the obesity rate would mean 32 million more obese people within two decades, Finkelstein says. That’s on top of the almost 78 million people who were obese in 2010.
Extra weight takes a huge toll on health, increasing the risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, many types of cancer, sleep apnea and other debilitating and chronic illnesses.
“Obesity is one of the biggest contributors for why healthcare spending has been going up over the past 20 years,” says Kenneth Thorpe, a professor of health policy at Emory University in Atlanta.
The obesity rate was relatively stable in the USA between 1960 and 1980, when about 15% of people fell into the category. It increased dramatically in the ’80s and ’90s and was up to 32% in 2000 and 36% in 2010, according to CDC data. Obesity inched up slightly over the past decade, which has caused speculation that the obesity rate might be leveling off.
Finkelstein, Trogdon and colleagues predicted future obesity rates with a statistical analysis using different CDC data, including body mass index, of several hundred thousand people. Body mass is a number that takes into account height and weight. Their estimates suggest obesity is likely to continue to increase, although not as fast as it has in the past.
Finkelstein says the estimates assume that things have gotten about as bad as they can get in the USA, in terms of an environment that promotes obesity. The country “is already saturated” with fast-food restaurants, cheap junk food and electronic technologies that render people sedentary at home and work, he says. “We don’t expect the environment to get much worse than it is now, or at least 0we hope it doesn’t.”
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6 Responses
This is all about mommy govt getting and keeping their grubby paws on our healthcare. EVERYTHING could be tied into health and once they get their hands on it, they won’t stop. Game over!
It is easily curable. All you have to do is eat less and exercise more. No one is being force fed.
We should consider our own history. Back in Europe, in lets say the first half of the 1940s, obesity was NOT a problem. Whereas eating less is always within your power, the cure to starvation may not be something you control. So perhaps we should say “Baruch ha-Shem” we are living at a time when obesity is the leading public health problem.
I think it is time for the rabbi to slow down talking about lashon harah and begin to speak about achilas harah along side it. The blubber buckets in the frum community are getting out of hand and this causes early death, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and many more terrible diseases.
My sister was grossly overweight and did not watch herself. She ended up with diabetes, then needed dialysis, and a defibrillator and finally died suddenly at the age of 56.
Lets speak out against overeating; we can enjoy Shabbos with out shtuffing!
It’s the bagels, people!!! 🙂
I would definitely not say Baruch Hashem for obesity.. But I understand your point.
On another note, I literally could vomit at the sight of some of these chazers at Kiddish piling cholent and kugel and crackers and who knows what into their mouths like its going out of style. I feel as though people think it is acceptable now and they no longer have to worry about A their health and B looking attractive for their spouses. It is so dangerous we need to speak out as this problem is getting worse.
2. How can you compare anything with der alter heim and days gone by? We have more food available to us than they ever did. People back in the day had to worry about their next meal, unlike most of us. The average yid probably has more food on his shabbos table than Shlomo HaMelech had!