OECD: First-Ever Obesity Forecast
Citizens of the world’s richest countries are getting fatter and fatter and the United States is leading the charge…[according to a] study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development…
In the U.S. the cost in dollars of obesity, including higher health care spending and lost production, is already equivalent to 1 percent of the country’s total gross domestic product, the report said. That compares to half a percent in other OECD countries… These costs could rise two- or threefold over the coming years.
The OECD report is available here [gated but with summary].
This isn’t the kind of contest you really want to win.
Depressing. Makes me want to go eat a cheeseburger.
I think obesity forecasts are not normally part of health care forecasts. So if the two are combined, health care spending is on a steeper curve than most people think.
Throughout most of human history it required constant toil to scrape together enough food for a family to survive. Developed countries are now comparatively wealthy; and the production of food is mechanized. It should not come as a surprise that obesity is a greater problem (even among the poor) than hunger in the United States. In the future, health problems related to too much food consumption will far outstrip conditions from the past related to malnourishment.
Despite all of the worries about obesity, the US government still spends billions on farm subsidies every year, thereby making all of our sodas and candy that much cheaper.
One hopes that the OECD took into account the fact that the NHANES data show that obesity prevalence appears to have stabilized, or been increasing much more slowly, since 2000. And that the government changed the definition of overweight in the late 1990s, increasing the number of overweight Americans by millions.
The increase in the 1980s was sudden and remains unexplained.