Fitness Files: Eat that burger, but I’ll end up paying the healthcare consequences

The laugh’s on me.

Well, me and everybody else who preaches diet and exercise.

An article in the Los Angeles Times says 38% of adults and 17% of kids are considered obese and that studies show that we are largely failing to keep Americans from getting fat.

“We” includes government agencies, foundations, churches and schools that “squander hundreds of millions of dollars … trying to fight the obesity epidemic.”

So, few Americans listen to diet and exercise gurus.

Maybe advising people what to eat is none of our business. Nobody likes being admonished about food. I’d flatten any weirdo nutritionist stepping between me and that half bag of chips left over from our last party.

So what if a growing segment of our population is not just overweight but obese? Lets look at the economics of obesity this election year, when the issues of government spending, taxation and consumer costs are campaign trail rhetoric. We’ll venture into a subject that even the most incendiary candidate won’t touch: the costs of the obesity epidemic.

A Fiscal Times article from May 2015 titled “New Lifetime Estimate of Obesity Costs: $92,235 Per Person” cites UC Davis research.

At the risk of overfeeding my readers numbers, I’ll add that an analysis prepared last June by Scott Kahan, director of the National Center for Weight & Wellness at George Washington University, pegged the total yearly costs of obesity as the following:

• Including medical and non-medical services, decreased worker productivity, disability and premature death, $305.1 billion annually.

• Direct medical costs, $190 billion.

• Non-medical costs, including health education and behavioral change, add $50 billion.

• Absenteeism and subpar workplace productivity, $65.1 billion.

Yet there’s more from phitamerica.org, which assesses yearly costs of obesity:

• Nearly 21% of total U.S. healthcare costs are obesity related.

• The Brookings Institution says obese Americans pay 105% more for prescriptions.

• At a cost of $3.4 billion, cars burn around 938 million gallons of gasoline per year, more today than 1960, when Americans weighed less.

• The Society of Actuaries estimates that U.S. employers lose 164 billion in productivity from obesity-related issues.

• An estimated 6.4-billion loss is realized yearly from obesity-related employee absenteeism.

• U.S. airlines spend $1 billion on an extra 350 million gallons of fuel for transporting overweight passengers.

• Medicare and Medicaid spend nearly $62 billion on obesity-related costs.

OK, OK! So why should we care about blockbuster spending related to our overeating habits?

Well, if Americans cared about health hazards like heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, joint pain and cancer, obesity would decrease, not increase. So maybe we need to pay heed to obesity costs.

“This really is a situation that’s beyond business as usual,” said Walter Willett, a professor and chairman of the department of nutrition at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We have to think about serious interventions that go beyond the norm.”

Unaddressed, the costs to our already overloaded healthcare system will continue to mount, with individual expenses being the most direct economic consequence. In fact, a study credited to Dr. Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University finds that obesity costs will quadruple over the next decade.

So don’t listen to the fatness doomsayers. However, plan on writing ever-larger checks for health insurance and transportation and sharing the losses to our GNP.

Whether you order the grand slam burger is your business. But whose business is the economic burden of that burger?

You decide. Is it your business or everybody’s bill?

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Newport Beach resident CARRIE LUGER SLAYBACK is a 72-year-old marathoner who brought home first places in LA Marathons 2013 and 2014 and the Carlsbad Marathon 2015. She lives in Newport Beach.