The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the medical costs of treating obesity-related diseases topped $147 billion in 2008, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.
During the past decade that cost of treating obesity effectively doubled: The medical costs associated with obesity were pegged at $74 billion in 1998. The number of obese people in the U.S. rose 37 percent between 1998 and 2006. In 2006 obesity costs accounted for about 9.1 percent of all medical costs. Obese people also spent about 42 percent more than people of normal weight on medical costs in 2006, which makes for a difference of $1,429. Most of those costs were from prescription drugs.
The CDC said that the average American is about 23 pounds overweight and consumers about 250 more calories a day than the average American did two or three decades ago.
The CDC’s budget for nutrition, physical activity and obesity programs is only about $43 million for this year.
At Qualcomm’s Smart Services Leadership Summit in San Diego this week, the West Wireless Health Institute’s Dr. Eric Topol noted that we now have uncovered the the genetic contribution to non-syndromic human obesity.
“We now know at birth who is likely to be unequivocablly associated with the propensity to become obese,” Topol said. A wireless health solution like the one Philometron is developing, Topol said, would enable users to keep track of “calories in and calories out” through the use of a wireless “band aid” equipped with sensors that can report the metrics to the user’s smartphone.
“That’s doable – it’s just a matter of when,” Topol said. “… [People] sure aren’t going to be looking up [their calorie intake] on a calorie book… This is the biggest chance we have at improving obesity around the world.”