Falling asleep last night, mind wandering everywhere from finances to databases to disease, I began wondering about obesity and disease. That is, won’t the current epidemic cause lots of health problems for, well, for us? I’m still covered by that description even after losing 53 pounds, I guess, and ought to be honest; I plan to keep at the weight loss until I reach a healthy size, then follow the Atkins maintenance guidelines. But back to the question at hand…
I look around today and see chubby kids, hefty teens, and huge adults and can’t help but wonder how people let themselves get that way. I honestly don’t know myself how I did except that the thought just never occured to me even as I kept needing larger and larger clothes. Thankfully friends and loved ones didn’t let me off the hook but kept asking me when I was going to do something about it. Where are the friends and loved ones of all these other people?
So let’s assume that a substantial majority of the currently obese do not go to the Atkins approach or Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig but continue as they are into late middle age and beyond. The medical problems, one would think, will simply explode exponentially. Anything from bad backs and bad feet to hypertension to organ failures to heart attacks and strokes; heck, I’m not that familiar with disease but I’m probably understating the range of possibilities here.
And all of these problems will cost money to treat. Blood pressure medication isn’t that expensive but all the doctor office visits, X-Rays and CAT scans, operations, hospital stays surely will add up; I bet there’s a study out there somewhere but I’m just not up to the Googling on a Sunday morning to find it. Where is all this money going to come from? If people, especially corporate benefit managers and their bosses, think that insurance rates are going up fast now, wait ten years when this trend starts hitting the books and I wonder if the current system will be brought to its knees.
Up until now, smoking has probably been the ‘voluntary’ activity that caused/causes the most treatment expense but its impact on the system is probably waning as fewer and fewer people light up each year. We allowed insurance plans to cover smokers’ illnesses but in recent years governments and individuals have been winning lawsuits against the tobacco companies to recover the cost, so much so that (one of?) the biggest, Atria/Phillip Morris, now claims that it may go bankrupt due to an adverse result in Illinois.
But health problems due to improper eating are much more easily cured, at much lower cost, if only the patient is willing. A few people, proportionally, do have underlying genetic and glandular disorders that are not simple to correct but otherwise every fat person can become a healthy size without question. They need only make the choice to begin eating in a healthy way. Note that I’m not calling for a mass conversion to a controlled carbohydrate diet or any other specific plan: some will do best with Atkins, others with Slim-Fast, and others just by reducing portion sizes.
Restaurants and food manufacturers can help out though such changes may not be in their best interest. That’s a whole other can of worms and one I’m not prepared to go into in this essay, that conflict of interest, but suffice to say it won’t be an easy obstacle to overcome. After all, how many kids start down the path to Fattyhood because they eat a bowl or two of nearly pure sugar and starch every morning and are helped along by cartoon hero-pushed snacks every afternoon?
Many leaders in our society run under a banner labelled Family Values to strengthen the rationale for their cause. This issue would certainly seem to me to be a true family issue. Parents need to provide proper nutrition to their children and teach them healthy eating habits regardless of the pressure kids put on to have the latest cool but nutionally valueless foods. One may agree or disagree on the propriety of, say, same sex marriage, school prayer, and the like but I find myself having great difficulty believing that anyone would disagree that a primary parental responsibility is to imbue a child with healthy habits.
So I come back to my initial question: who will pay for this? In the end, Social Security may or may not have enough money to pay Boomers what we’re owed in retirement, Nabisco and General Mills, McDonalds and Burger King, Coca-Cola and Pepsi may go broke defending lawsuits and paying of damage awards, but will our system be able to handle the huge financial burden of the obesity epidemic? Or is it up to all of us to come to each others’ aid now to cure this ailment before that happens and the tsunamai’s wave bursts past our shorelines?
I think it is not too late. If a true couch potato like me can lose over half my unhealthy excess in a year with a simple change in eating and a modest increase in exercise, I believe most of my fellow fatties can as well. Emotional support is a truly important element of success, a simple thing for thoughtful friends, co-workers, and family members to give each other. We’ll have to fight the food companies with their huge advertising budgets and teach the restaurants to serve smaller portions again, and fight the temptation to reward every small loss with a Krispy Kreme or small pizza.
What choice do we have, though? If we hope to have a healthy, prosperous America in 30 or 40 years, we cannot be on our knees paying for the cost of treating the overweight. No, we must make war on this problem, a campaign more successful than anti-smoking or the War on Drugs. Even if the result of failure is far less obvious, the true cost is far higher. If you’re already a healthy sized person, look around you to see who needs your support. If you are fat, look inside yourself and find the strength to begin the battle.
BillSaysThis 