All communities where obesity is rife will bear the cost - and already are now. Just think of hospital beds occupied by people - depriving others from their use - whose obesity has gotten them into some sort of medical fix.
Currently, about 32 percent of men and 35 percent of women in the US are obese. Obesity is due to replace tobacco as the “single most important preventable cause of chronic non-communicable diseases,” notes Reuters,and it’s projected to cause an extra 7.8 million cases of diabetes, 6.8 million cases of heart disease and stroke, and 539,000 cases of cancer. Other health problems stemming from obesity include osteoarthritis and high blood pressure.
Obesity rates are also on the rise in Britain: By 2030, 41-48 percent of men and 35-43 percent of women in the UK will be obese. Currently, 26 percent of both sexes are. Obesity pays a huge toll on the healthcare costs. In the US, health costs for problems associated with obesity will increase by 2.6 percent or $66 billion per year and by 2 percent, or £2 billion per year, in the UK. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times points out that money spent on obesity-related problems in the US could increase 13 to 16 percent over 20 years.
Moreover, while the West is definitely the place where the obesity epidemic is well underway, obesity is “no longer just a Western problem,” says Majid Ezzati, a professor of public health at Imperial College London. Around the world, around 1.5 billion adults are overweight. A further 0.5 billion are obese, with 170 million children classified as overweight or obese. People are the heaviest in the Pacific Islands, such as American Samoa. In the industrialized world, people in the US are heaviest and those in Japan the slimmest."
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