Obesity is weighing on the U.S. economy.
As a panel of scientists considers ways to help Americans trim down, unpublished research shows medical expenses linked to being extremely overweight have skyrocketed. Experts say the damage is augmented by reduced productivity, wider gender and income inequality and even higher transportation costs.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture will host a public meeting this month on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s recommendations, and will accept comments though April 8. The resulting policy document — the eighth edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans — is expected to be published by the agencies toward the end of 2015.
Some 35.7 percent of Americans 20 to 74 years old were obese in the period from 2009 to 2012, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. That’s up from 31.1 percent a decade earlier and 13.3 percent in 1960-1962. The CDC considers adults obese when their body mass index, which takes into account weight and height, is 30 or higher.
As a result, there is growing urgency to come up with plans to check the trend. The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, the panel of scientists that counsels government agencies, last month recommended that sugary drinks and foods be taxed to reduce their consumption. The report, released Feb. 19, went on to advise that the revenue generated could be used to promote healthier behavior or subsidize the cost of fruits and vegetables.
“This really is a situation that’s beyond business as usual,” said Walter Willett, a professor and chairman of the department of nutrition at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. “We have to think about serious interventions that go beyond the norm.”
Widespread obesity raised medical-care costs by $315.8 billion in 2010, according to John Cawley, an economics professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. That amounted to about $3,508 a year for each obese person, the latest available data showed. The expenses, which include doctors’ appointments, hospital stays, prescription drugs and home health care, were up 48 percent from 2005’s $213 billion after adjusting for inflation, the researchers found.
The findings, to be published later this year in the journal PharmacoEconomics, represent the combined work of fellow researchers Chad Meyerhoefer, Adam Biener, Mette Hammer and Neil Wintfeld.
“It’s a misreading of the evidence to think that a modest tax on a narrow category of food or drinks would have a substantial impact on calories or weight,” Cawley said. “It would probably have to be a broader and bigger tax to really change people’s behavior, and I don’t know whether that’s politically feasible.”
Nonetheless, in combination with other policies such as increasing physical activity and improving access to quality food, a multifaceted approach that includes a financial lever could make a difference, Harvard’s Willett said.
Chronic illnesses linked to obesity, such as diabetes and heart disease, as well as stroke and cancer, are expensive to treat, Cawley said. Moreover, the costs are usually paid by private and public health insurance, meaning that leaner people are subsidizing those with less healthy diets, he said. “All of us are paying these costs.”
While such spending doesn’t directly reduce economic growth, it does represent a shift in priorities toward health care and away from things such as business investment in other industries that could boost output down the road.
Obesity also poses problems in less direct ways. Excessive fat is correlated with an increase in absenteeism from work because of health issues, said Tatiana Andreyeva, director of economic initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut in Hartford.
That costs the nation about $8.65 billion a year, Andreyeva found with fellow researchers Joerg Luedicke and Y. Claire Wang. Obese employees miss an extra 1.1 to 1.7 days of work a year compared to their normal-weight counterparts.
The costs of obesity also manifest themselves in less obvious ways. Heavier people use more gasoline and jet fuel to move from place to place and require the support of stronger infrastructure.
As many as one billion additional gallons of gasoline are consumed each year transporting overweight and obese Americans, according to research from Sheldon Jacobson and Douglas King at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That would amount to about $2.5 billion, according to the average cost of regular gasoline as of March 3.