These words are here to pick up some thoughts dropped a few days ago as “Harsh and Painful Truths,” of the kind that keep coming back to haunt us.
Some realities need to be accepted. One of them is: People resent paying for other people’s mistakes. The average American is generally okay with the idea that tax dollars will help a person who was pushed onto the subway tracks and suffered a leg amputation.
But if the issue is someone who has spent a lifetime becoming corpulent, when that misfortune could have been prevented, it’s a different matter. The idea of contributing to the kitty for a morbidly obese person’s medical expenses just might be considered objectionable.
In many people’s minds obesity is, always and only, a preventable situation. They feel no empathy for anyone who bought a packet of white powder and contracted a major addiction, on the grounds that the person should have known better. Viewed from the perspective of that same mindset, obesity is an almost identical situation. Whether objectively justifiable or not, it is the way a large number of people feel.
Meanwhile, someone with a generous and forgiving nature might hope to convince the hard-hearted to be less critical, and to spare the feelings of addicts who are now trying to change. Another response would be to use that energy in a different way, like by convincing people to not become addicts in the first place. Similarly, those who care about the obesity issue, and who don’t want to see obese people getting their feelings hurt, might choose to support issues connected with the prevention of that condition.
A heavy work
We will not go into the whole text here, but it could be useful to take a peek at a five-author article from Journal of Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy, with the cumbersome but usefully descriptive title, “Costs of obesity, obesity-related complications, and weight loss in the United States: A systematic literature review.”
The work’s abstract quite usefully states that last year, around 100 million American grownups were obese. (The point we are aiming at is one that should be obvious from the start. Surely, their hundreds of thousands of parents did not mean for that to happen. Those moms and dads never intended for their beloved offspring to become PwO, or People with Obesity!)
Of those hundred million obese American adults, 75% or three-quarters of them also suffer from complications related to that obese condition. Here is a direct quotation pertaining to their condition:
“Related medical spending exceeds $261 billion.”
Subsequent to that thought, we are told that the objective of this study was to summarize the estimates of the direct medical costs incurred by those PwO…
[…] by obesity severity and presence of obesity-related complications and to characterize the impact of weight loss on direct medical cost savings.
The methodology is then explained, and it translates to an understanding that this task involved a lot of complicated work. Before even starting, the individuals concerned were divided into groups (class I, II, or III) according to the severity of their obesity. Anyway, almost 10,000 related records were consulted, and the researchers identified 6.0 of them, or 32 studies, as being useful for their purposes.
Here was some unwelcome news. Obesity-related complications (such as hypertension and type 2 diabetes) do not wind up costing just a little bit more than plain old obesity, but a lot more. And yet, a relatively simple (for some individuals) weight loss of only 5% over a year could lead to “substantial savings.” Weight-loss medications were found to help, too.
Obviously, a lot more facts and figures were involved in deducing numerous conclusions, and not surprisingly,
[L]ongitudinal studies considering a wider range and overlap of obesity-related complications are needed to help document and quantify the current direct cost burden of obesity.
What is the point here? Glad you asked. Most people who read this blog have children, and hold many aspirations for those young lives. We hope to see our kids grow up to be champion athletes, or career-qualified musicians, or dedicated teachers, or farmers who care as much about preserving the land as they do about making profits.
This sort of future-gazing could go on and on, but there is a point. Not one of us, not a single parent among us, is sitting here thinking, “Gee, I hope my kid grows up to be a PwO — especially one with extra-disabling and super-costly complications!”
This suggestion is for anyone whose kids might be headed in an overweight direction: Please consider getting acquainted with a system called BrainWeighve, which could make an enormous difference in the lives of not only our own kids, but also their children — the next generation who are not even here yet.
We have the opportunity to shape and guide the fates of people far into the future. To guarantee that our present-day progeny will not grow up obese could make a difference that reverberates and resonates down through the years. And what have we got to lose by giving it a chance?
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Costs of obesity, obesity-related complications, and weight loss in the United States: A systematic literature review,” Journal of Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy, July 2025
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