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The Economics of Obesity: A QQ & A With the Author of The Fattening of America

The NY Times reports:

"We’ve blogged about obesity at length here at Freakonomics. The health economist Eric Finkelstein has been studying the subject for years, and, along with co-author Laurie Zuckerman, has just published a book, The Fattening of America, which analyzes the causes and consequences of obesity in the U.S. Finkelstein agreed to answer our questions about the book.

Q: You state that the factors contributing to the dramatic rise in American (and worldwide) obesity, from air conditioning to restaurant portions to modern medications, are all fundamentally economic issues. What are the most significant ways modern society has made it easier to be obese?

A: Modern society is giving Americans many more incentives to gain weight than to lose it. We are, in fact, victims of our success as a nation. The two most obvious factors are: 1) the abundance of cheap, tasty foods; and 2) the new technologies that allow us to be increasingly more productive at work and at home while burning fewer calories. For example, between 1980 and 2005, the price of food fell 14 percent relative to non-food items, so it is thus not surprising that we are eating more food.

And what kind of foods are we eating? Well, consider the French fry. Fries, if made from scratch, take about 40 minutes to prepare, complete with peeling, slicing, and messy, splattering oil. Frozen French fries? Ready to eat in under 14 minutes. And that’s still a lot of work compared to just stopping at a drive-through on the way home from work. To an economist, then, it is no shocker that the average American now consumes almost 60 pounds of frozen potato products per year, more than triple the amount consumed per person in 1965.

And at the same time, we’re burning less calories. No surprise here. We all know that we are spending more time watching TV, but there are also less obvious culprits that are keeping us ensconced in our chairs. One example is that I recently had an inexpensive printer installed in my office. So now I don’t even have to walk the 100 steps to the community printer down the hall a few times a day.

But technology hasn’t just made our jobs and our lives easier; we can also pop some pills or get out clogged arteries cleaned out with relative ease, thus lowering the health costs of obesity. In fact, research by the Center for Disease Control reveals that today’s obese population has better blood pressure and cholesterol values than normal-weight adults did 30 years ago. As any economist worth his weight will tell you, if the costs of being obese go down, and there are people who like to eat and don’t like to exercise, we are bound to see obesity rates go up."

Read on here.

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