Land of the Sick, Home of the Obese
Jul 29 at 6:06pm by Aileen
In the year 2030, what’s left of us ‘Baby-Boomers’ will be in our late 70s and early 80s. We will not likely be the largest demographic bump in the general population at that time, as more than half of us will have died off by then. 2030 is also the year that researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, along with researchers at other institutions, project that 86% of Americans could be obese if current trends continue.
Worse, projections show that 96% of non-Hispanic black women and 91% of Mexican-American men will be in those numbers. The costs of this situation amount to nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of obesity-related health care spending, or 1 in every 6 health care dollars.
The projection is based on three decades’ worth of collected data from national surveys. As the obese population ages the health care costs related to being fat will more than double every decade. In addition to hypertension, heart disease and stroke, there is also the link between being overweight and type-2 diabetes. Not to mention the fact that obese children - an increasing problem - have a shorter life expectancy than healthy children.
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