Fat: 75 percent of Americans overweight by 2015

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Obesity, Smoking Add $100 Billion a Year to U.S. Health Costs

Oct. 2, 2007
By Avram Goldstein

Americans are more likely than Europeans to be treated for preventable chronic diseases caused by obesity and smoking, adding more than $100 billion a year to U.S. health spending, a study found.

The U.S. is worse than 10 western European nations in the prevalence of heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis and excess weight among people more than 50 years old, according to a study published today on the Web site of the journal Health Affairs. The obesity rate among Americans is 33 percent, compared with 17 percent in 10 western European nations, said researchers at Emory University in Atlanta.

Health policy makers can’t rein in medical costs in the U.S. unless they reverse obesity trends, said lead researcher Kenneth Thorpe, an Emory professor of health policy. Only multiple approaches to encourage better nutrition, such as new tax, marketing and farm policies, will work, he said.

“We took the smoking rate from around 50 percent in the 1960s to around 20 percent today,” Thorpe said in a telephone interview. “The same menu of a dozen interventions is going to have to occur in some of these illnesses as well.”

Health-care spending on each person in the U.S. was $6,037, the highest in the world and 50 percent higher than Switzerland’s $4,045, the most in Europe, the report said.

Thorpe studied data from Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland for 2004, the latest year for which comparative data was available. The lowest spending was Spain’s $2,099, 35 percent of the U.S. medical bill.

Life Expectancy

Life expectancy in the U.S. to a child born in 2005 was 77.9 years, according to the World Health Organization. Longevity in Europe ranges from 79.2 years in the Netherlands to 81.4 years in Switzerland, WHO said.

The Emory study compared prevalence and treatment rates for chronic conditions including high cholesterol, cancer, diabetes, lung diseases, arthritis and osteoporosis.

The biggest gap was for arthritis. In the U.S., 54 percent of patients older than 50 are diagnosed with the painful joint disease, compared with 21 percent in Europe. Arthritis can be caused by obesity, according to the study.

The only chronic illness diagnosed more frequently in Europe was osteoporosis, a weakening of bones that leads to increasing fractures. Doctors diagnosed it in 7.8 percent of Europeans and 5 percent of Americans.

If Americans older than 50 were diagnosed and treated at the lower European rates for those conditions, average health- care spending per person in the U.S. would drop by $1,195 to $1,750 a year, Thorpe said.

Policies set by Medicare, the U.S. government-run insurance program for 43 million elderly and disabled people, will be pivotal, Thorpe said.

“We need to have a fundamental re-examination of the existing Medicare program,” which does a “mediocre job at best” of managing patients with chronic health problems, Thorpe said.

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First They Came For the Smokers…Then They Came For the Overweight

August 31, 2007
By Jacqueline S. Homan

It’s funny…well, maybe not so funny…that every time there is a group of people whom it is legally, socially and politically acceptable to discriminate against for jobs, deny all around equitable treatment and abuse with impunity; there is some “study” concocted by “intellectuals” and “experts” to justify it.

When overweight people, especially middle-aged overweight women, are denied jobs and consequently end up poor; they are then berated for “not doing anything” about their appearance. Fitness clubs aren’t cheap. Neither is fitness equipment often advertised on the shopping channel by fitness gurus. They cost a lot of money – money that low income or unemployed people simply don’t have when paying the rent, mortgage and utilities is of paramount importance and there isn’t any discretionary cash to be had.

?For those who are overweight and who are fortunate enough to have enough economic security and financial stability to belong to a fitness club, keeping up with an exercise regimen is often fraught with abuse by the “pretty and thin” people who treat them with disdain, or as one poster put it: the attitude of “How dare you bring your obese body into MY gym where I have to LOOK at you!” Those who are overweight who are trying to do something positive for themselves by going to the fitness clubs to swim or work out get treated so disrespectfully and cruelly by those who enjoy thinner leaner figures that it’s too mentally and emotionally exhausting to continue going. Thus, they often never return to the gym after being discouraged by the shabby treatment from inconsiderate and judgmental people. It is these same superficial and judgmental people who, ironically, are always the first to admonish the overweight to “get off their fat asses and exercise”. No one wants to willingly subject themselves to such abuse – unless they have masochistic tendencies.

Some of the discrimination and poor treatment the overweight, the smokers and those over age 40 experience is because of personal preferences, but more often it is a problem compounded by the media. The media plays the whore by pandering to the special interest groups funding these “studies” – which are largely based on junk science as fancy excuses to marginalize a given target group of people, be it the overweight or those who smoke.

What is more reprehensible about this is that these special interest groups who are causing untold pain and misery for those targeted for vilification are doing so for a profit. With all the appetite suppressants, nicotine replacement therapy drugs, antidepressants, botox shots, liposuction and plastic surgery; there is a lot of money at stake. Trillions of dollars in wealth would literally vanish if there actually was a proven means of curing weight problems, preventing aging, or preventing people from smoking. Despite all the medical technology and wonder drugs, there are still people who are overweight, there are still people getting old, and there are still people who won’t quit smoking. In the end everybody dies – regardless of how good they looked before being shot up with formaldehyde and crammed into a pine box.

Obviously, the diploma’d elite are not omniscient and do not have all the right answers. The definition of an “expert” is someone who has been educated beyond their mental capacity, and who makes up fancy excuses to justify discrimination and the abuse of others – using the media to bolster their agenda.

The media is especially at fault for prostituting itself to these sanctimonious “experts” and the special interests that fund their “studies.” While I firmly believe in preserving freedom of speech and of the press, it should be noted that freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. Freedom of speech does not entitle you to yell “Bomb!” on an airplane. When freedom of speech is used in conjunction with freedom from responsibility by the media, there is a major problem. This lack of responsibility on the media’s part has contributed significantly to smokers being thrown out of their jobs and denied the right to consume a legal product in public for which they are taxed oppressively. This same lack of media responsibility is also a major contributing factor to the overweight being denied jobs and older people being forced out of jobs – causing severe economic hardship and poverty for many who do not deserve it.

The media is also largely responsible for the false elevation of the medical community to god-hood. This largely contributed to the false sense of security and invincibility so many people have developed. An extreme example is that of a teenager who underestimated the risks and dangers of climbing around a parked freight train in order to cross the tracks to hurry home for a friend’s birthday party. When the 6,000 ton train lurched forward, the teen fell and the train rolled over his left arm and left leg, crushing and severing them. The young man nearly bled to death. While he was being carted to the hospital and realizing that he lost two limbs, he underestimated the severity and permanent nature of his injuries because he thought that his severed arm and leg could simply be surgically reattached due to the marvels of modern technology and modern medicine. He had seen and heard about limb reattaching on educational medical programs on TV. The doctors could fix everything for him and make him all better, or so he thought. He now wears a hook for an arm and a prosthetic leg. His injuries resulted in the medical revocation of his drivers’ license – permanently.

If the media can lull people into a false sense of security that causes them to underestimate the dangers of fooling around on train tracks and the severity of losing a limb, then it is no surprise that the media has caused smokers to be unjustly criminalized and that the overweight are denied jobs – then labeled “lazy slobs” for failing to join fitness clubs in order to “do something about it”. In our gerontophobic society, it’s also perfectly okay to deny older people jobs, benefits, or promotions and career advancement opportunities. The concept of older people, overweight people or smokers actually having happy and healthy sex lives is reviled as “gross” – because of what the media projects. Thin young Barbie Doll types may prance about on beaches and swimming pools in thong bikinis with impunity, but women who are plump from recently giving birth are abused and discriminated against for daring to breast feed in public – however discreetly they do so and with minimal breast exposure. The media reaffirms this point of view: thin girls in bikinis that show it all are desirable, beautiful and sexy – nursing mothers with their post-partum figures are not.

In sum, the problem isn’t the overweight, the smokers, or those over age 40. It’s the prejudice and lousy attitudes by those who lack sufficient intelligence and the discipline to resist brainwashing by the media and the powerful special interests controlling it.
? Copyright 2007 The Smoker’s Club, Inc. Please repost with link back to this original article.

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One’s weight ‘socially contagious’

July 25, 2007
Nanci Hellmich
Obesity is contagious.

One person’s obesity can significantly increase the chance that his or her friends, siblings and spouse also will become heavy, according to the first study done on how weight gain spreads through social networks. And if a person slims down, the people around him or her also may lose weight.

SUCCESS: From bad example to good

“Both obesity and thinness are socially contagious,” says study co-author James Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California-San Diego.

At the heart of the matter is the sharing of acceptable norms for weight, not just sharing the same eating and exercise habits, says internist Nicholas Christakis, also a study author and a professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School. If someone you care about gains weight, your notion of an acceptable body size may change. You may decide it’s OK to go up a couple of sizes, he says.

About a third of Americans are obese, about 30 or more pounds over a healthy weight, which increases their risk of heart disease, diabetes and other problems.

In the study, which was funded by the National Institute on Aging, researchers examined social ties among 12,067 people in the Framingham (Mass.) Heart Study, a multigeneration collection of data covering 32 years.

Findings are reported in today’s New England Journal of Medicine:

•When people become obese, the risk of their closest friends becoming obese over the next two to four years increases by 171%; the risk for their casual friends increases by 57%; their siblings’ risk, 40%; their spouse’s, 37%.

•The reverse also is true. When one person sheds pounds, it has a ripple effect and increases the chances by similar percentages that their friends, siblings and spouse will trim down, Fowler says.

•A man’s weight has more effect on the weight of his male buddies and brothers than on his sisters or female friends. And a woman’s weight has more effect on her girlfriends and sisters than her brothers or guy friends.

“Men look to men. Women look to women,” Fowler says. This may explain why friends appear to have more effect on weight than spouses do, he says.

If one person gains, it can affect social ties with three degrees of separation, so a friend of a friend of a friend also is affected, he says. “One person’s weight influences dozens of other people they are connected with both directly and indirectly. It can impact people who are connected through a mutual friend or family member.”

Surprisingly, researchers found that the obesity risk is not affected by geographic distance. “If you have a close friend or a sibling who lives a mile or a thousand miles away, that person’s weight gain can have the same affect on your weight,” Christakis says.

John Foreyt, an obesity researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, suggests: “If you are trying to lose or control your weight, pick your friends carefully. You may not want to be around people who are gaining weight or who are too heavy.”

The study may have implications for treatments. “If we can get even a small number of obese people to lose weight, it might have a ripple effect, and we could contribute to reversing the obesity epidemic,” Fowler says.

75 percent of Americans overweight by 2015?
July 22, 2007
Rigel Gregg
If you’re the type who gets motivated to change by hearing scary statistics, then here’s a doozy: experts predict that if Americans continue gaining weight at the current rate, by the year 2015 (that’s only 8 years from now!) 75 percent of us will be overweight or obese.
That’s not only a majority, but a major majority. Every group in society (kids, adolescents, adults) is steadily gaining weight, and considering that 66 percent of adults were overweight or obese in 2004, I guess it’s not really a big stretch that we’ll hit 75 percent by 2015. How depressing!

Study predicts 75 percent overweight in U.S. by 2015

Jul 18, 2007
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – If people keep gaining weight at the current rate, fat will be the norm by 2015, with 75 percent of U.S. adults overweight and 41 percent obese, U.S. researchers predicted on Wednesday.

A team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore examined 20 studies published in journals and looked at national surveys of weight and behavior for their analysis, published in the journal Epidemiologic Reviews.

“Obesity is a public health crisis. If the rate of obesity and overweight continues at this pace, by 2015, 75 percent of adults and nearly 24 percent of U.S. children and adolescents will be overweight or obese,” Dr. Youfa Wang, who led the study, said in a statement.

They defined adult overweight and obesity using a standard medical definition called body mass index. People with a BMI of 25 or above are considered overweight, while those with BMIs of 30 or above are obese and at serious risk of heart disease, diabetes and some cancers.

Studies show that 66 percent of U.S. adults were overweight or obese in 2003 and 2004. An alarming 80 percent of black women aged 40 or over are overweight and 50 percent are obese.

Sixteen percent of U.S. children and adolescents are overweight and 34 percent are at risk of becoming overweight, according to federal government figures.

Every group is steadily getting heavier, Wang said.

“Our analysis showed patterns of obesity or overweight for various groups of Americans,” said May Beydoun, who worked on the study.

“Obesity is likely to continue to increase, and if nothing is done, it will soon become the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.”

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Can Food Hook You?

Experts Chew Over Eating As Addiction

By WILLIAM HATHAWAY | Courant Staff Writer
July 11, 2007

BRANFORD – To Johnny Walker, Lucky Strikes and crack, get ready to think about adding Twinkies.

Yale University obesity experts held a meeting with several dozen scientists Tuesday to discuss the intriguing question of whether food can create as powerful an addiction as drugs or alcohol.

The consensus of those attending the informal seaside gathering at the Pine Orchard Club?

A definite maybe.

“The obese often use the language of addiction,” said Yale psychologist Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity and organizer of the conference. “They talk about wild cravings for food, they continue to eat even though the consequences are bad and some report food withdrawals or even developing tolerance for some foods.

“That does not mean that is an addiction,” he said, “but it’s certainly enough to make you look.”

If science determines that the obese can become as addicted to Ho Hos, Cheetos and Pringles as they might to drugs, cigarettes or alcohol, the implications on governmental policy could be significant, Brownell said.

“Think of the legality of marketing food to children if it is shown to have addictive properties,” said Brownell, a leading advocate for an array of nutritional reforms, including the elimination of unhealthy food from U.S. schools.

But Brownell concedes science is far from linking Coke and cocaine in the addictive substances Hall of Shame, and experts say it is unlikely addiction would account for a large share of the nation’s obesity problem.

However, circumstantial evidence about food addiction has accumulated to the point where it has piqued the curiosity of scientists.

“It wasn’t the obesity experts who got interested in addiction, it was the addiction scientists who got interested in food,” Brownell said. “People in our field have been slow to look at this … I think in part because of a bias that obesity is all about failure and personal responsibility, so why look at biology?”

Dr. Mark Gold, chief of addiction medicine at the University of Florida’s McKnight Brain Institute, said one possible bit of evidence is the dramatic decline in the risk of substance abuse as the pounds increase. The obese, in general, do not smoke, drink to excess, or do drugs, he said.

Conversely, those with eating disorders such as anorexia have remarkably high rates of addiction, and people who give up drugs, cigarettes and alcohol invariably gain weight, he said.

“It turns out that food and drugs compete for the same reward system in the brain,” Gold said.

Imaging scans comparing the brains of drug addicts and obese people who have shown an inability to stop eating show similar abnormalities in the production of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that activates reward centers of the brain, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, who has done research on the possible addictiveness of food.

Those similarities could mean that both drug addicts and the obese need more and more drugs or food to feel satiated, Volkow said.

But Volkow also points out there are differences between the brains of morbidly obese people and drug addicts.

It is also clear that many obese people do not meet all clinical criteria for addiction to drugs or alcohol.

Using those criteria, people would have to eat despite suffering adverse consequences from eating, suffer withdrawal symptoms without food, need increased amounts of food to gain the same effect, and give up social, recreational work opportunities in order to eat.

Volkow and Gold were more interested in finding ways to prevent obesity than assessing the legal or policy implications of their research. Volkow noted that people with a genetic predisposition for alcoholism are much less likely to develop a problem if they postpone drinking until late in life.

Perhaps, she wondered, the same type of prevention might work with obesity. People might avoid becoming obese if they avoid poor eating habits early in life.

“There is a critical period when you are best able to learn the violin and maybe it is the same thing with food,” Gold said.

“Maybe we should only feed kids boring meals.”
Contact William Hathaway at whathaway@courant.com

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