Obesity, healthcare, its costs and some solutions

"Obesity" is a polite, clinical and objective way of saying that people weigh too much.  It's a fact that Americans weigh too much.  Those who are very much overweight are obese.  Some of the causes of this are unavoidable, but most are not.

Excessive weight and obesity are expensive.  They cause lifestyle costs for the individual, they can lead to harmful and potentially deadly consequences for the overweight person, and the costs of health insurance and health care for everybody are higher because of obesity.

How many are obese?  Take a look at this:
                                         

Almost a third of our population falls into this high-risk, high-cost category, and the numbers are growing.

How does this problem begin?  Well, apparently a lot of it begins in childhood.

This is an obvious problem that begs to be fixed, but there's apparently not enough effort being put into it to make the solutions effective.  Maybe these ideas will help:

• Nip it in the bud -- there are a lot of overweight children these days, and most of them are overweight because of poor decisions on their part and because of ineffective and lax parental guidance and oversight, and sometimes downright overindulgence; it's time that all social institutions that touch on kids--schools, houses of worship, clubs--provide meaningful education to their young charges on the dangers of weight gain.
• Financial motivation for parents -- the people who are responsible for the problem will have to be charged for it; I don't know how to do this, but it seems reasonable to think that the health insurance companies, with appropriate governmental oversight, should be able to figure this one out, since they want to position themselves as the free-market nexus of all things that are financial for healthcare.
• Remove temptation -- since children spend lots of time in and around schools, let's make sure that whatever food they can get in those venues will not contribute to the problem; let the bureaucrats replace regular milk with non-fat milk, and have them remove fatty sweets and other foods when they are found in the cafeterias and the vending machines and replace them with healthier alternatives; and there are probably lots of other similar things that could be done.

I've actually heard and seen people who are parents of young children complain about "bureaucratic meddling" when somebody in nutritional authority in the school district replaces a too-fat food available in the school with a lower-fat alternative.  Get real, people!  That's just bitching and moaning, and it's harmful to the health of the children.

It seems to me that everybody--whether it's adults who are parents of young children, the children themselves, or adults as adults--need to have what I will call a "healthy food mindset."  This means simply accepting nutritional and scientific facts, such as:  fatty foods are bad; exercise is good; excessive caloric intake is bad; portion-size awareness is good; over-indulgence is bad; moderation is good.  I know that fully-loaded ice cream tastes real good -- I love it, too!  But it's meant just for those very infrequent, special times; it's not meant to be consumed as a daily food group all by itself!

These are just a few ideas, focusing on how obesity starts with the young ones.  The overall problem of an overweight population needs to be addressed at all ages and with all segments of the population.  These corrective ideas can be extended to be effective beyond childhood, but it always seems to be a good idea to begin things at the beginning.

Many thanks to my friend who suggested writing about this.  He deserves credit, but he cherishes his privacy.