7 ms·

Majority of US Healthcare Costs Are Caused by Bad Eating Habits

48 points by jyu 17y ago

vijayr 17y ago
Isn't it the same everywhere (assuming there is no war or natural calamity etc like situation)?
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  Not necessarily. For example: http://library.thinkquest.org/16665/causes.htm http://library.thinkquest.org/16665/causes.htm <- leading causes of mortality in ~20 countries. Look at how big the variations between different countries can be even for coarsely-grained statistics.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
Are American eating habits really that significantly different from Canadian eating habits to explain the fact that the US spends twice as much per capita as Canada spends - notwithstanding the 50 million Americans without coverage?
- ankeshk 17y ago
  Comparing Canada vs USA obesity rates shows that YES indeed eating habits seem to be very different: http://eaves.ca/2008/07/08/fatness-index-canada-vs-united-states/ http://eaves.ca/2008/07/08/fatness-index-canada-vs-united-st...
  - hughprime 17y ago
    If you look at the comments below the post, though, the comparison doesn't seem to be valid, due to different measurement methodologies.
  - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    WOW. That's just astonishing - thanks for the link! I think it's definitely worth studying how two very similar societies can have such radically different obesity indicators.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    As a Canadian living in the USA I have to say, we don't eat that differently in Canada, the big difference is we eat less. Canada is just as full of greasy, nutrtionless, processed-to-hell food as America is, but we simply do not consume as much of it, from my observations. When I moved to the USA I immediately (over 4 months) gained a buttload of weight (both figuratively and literally...). This is due to my bad habit of finishing everything on my plate. I've since fixed this and my weight is rapidly decreasing. Yay. Serving sizes in the USA are simply ludicrous and completely out of step with reality. Before talking about high-fiber, low-fat diets, Americans need to do one simple (but difficult) thing: eat less. Eat way less. A friend and I (both Canadian) paid a visit to the Cheesecake Factory this last weekend - when our plates landed on our table our eyes bugged out. There was enough food to feed 4 people in a standard Canadian restaurant. I'm not even exaggerating :S The table next to ours polished their food single-handedly and then ordered dessert. We were shocked. How any single person can consume that much food in one sitting is unimaginable, and somewhat disgusting.
    - hughprime 17y ago
      Well, the Cheesecake Factory is a bit of an outlying case -- those portions are ridiculous even by American standards. But as an Australian living in the US I agree with you -- I find it hard just to get a normally-sized meal for breakfast or lunch. In Australia, if you order a ham and cheese sandwich, you get ham and cheese. In America if you order a ham and cheese sandwich you get a huge stack of ham, a bit of cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickles (!?), maybe some sprouts, mayo and a bright yellow mustard-like substance. If I tell them I just want ham and cheese they look at me like I'm crazy (and I am, cuz I'll be paying about six bucks for this sandwich anyway). On the other hand, last I heard Australian rates of obesity have overtaken US rates. On the other other hand, Australia probably has more of the slightly-fat people (ordinary folks with big beer guts) and fewer of the ridiculously-fat people (acres of waddling flesh or too-fat-to-walk electric wheelchair folks).
      - potatolicious 17y ago
        I've also found that Americans like to lather sauce over everything, which begs the question of if they'd realize if we replaced all their meat with soy protein. This may be part of the diet problem. In Canada we have ranch sauce, we have mayo, but it wasn't until I got to the US that I started seeing these things going on everything under the sun, in gigantic quantities. Why have the ham sandwich if all you'll be tasting is the mayo?
- pchivers 17y ago
  As a Canadian who visits the United States often, I can definitely say the portion sizes are a lot larger in the United States. Every time I go to the US I go into a state of shock when I see the portion sizes. You would think that after 20-30 trips to US I would have learned to adjust my expectations by now, but it is still amazing to me to witness how much food Americans eat no matter how many times I see it.
  - tjr 17y ago
    I once offered to pick up some "Chinese food" for some colleagues visiting the US from China. They didn't recognize anything on the menu, and ended up ordering the "house special", with grilled chicken, vegetables, and rice. Reasonably healthy, from the looks of it. About an hour after getting our food, I remarked that they had not finished what they ordered. "This is too much food for us; we can't eat it all!" they explained. "It's too much for us too," I assured them, "but we eat it all anyway."
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      For the most part, "Chinese food" (served outside china) is an attempt by Chinese resturaunters to cater to the tastes of locals. So a better description of what you had was "American Chinese Food". If you ever have the opportunity, try Indian Chinese Food. It's fantastic.
hughprime 17y ago
The headline "Majority US Healthcare Costs Are Caused by Bad Eating Habits" is not the headline of the article, nor is this supposed fact stated anywhere in the article. I very much doubt it's true, and I don't think it's well-defined enough to even be false.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  (...) the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet. This is a key argument in the article and the headline seems like a reasonable paraphrase of that.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    At the minimum, a lack of physical activity has to be included as a factor in this along side diet.
    - anigbrowl 17y ago
      Haven't you heard? The new wisdom is that exercise makes you even fatter. Well, I exaggerate, but I'm referring to a recent Time story saying 'exercise won't make you thin' (the idea being that you still need to eat less or you'll just get hungrier and never lose weight). You are quite right, but 'pin the tail on the donkey' seems to sell better :-/
      - ars 17y ago
        It's not actually new wisdom. We are just going back to what we knew 40 years ago. Basically, between 1960 and 2009 we thought exercise will make you thinner. Outside those times exercise was thought to increase appetite.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
thesecret 17y ago
I work in healthcare and this is my understanding from the responses of patients that I encounter - fast food is cheap. One of the families I work with, both parents are diabetic and the children are all overweight. I asked them about their eating habit and the answer was : McDonalds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Why? Because it's cheap to eat at McDonalds for a family of 4 than it is to buy vegetables at the market....for 3 bucks, you get a whole meal for one person. $3 at Safeway, you only get..a cabbage and some tomatoes? They didn't understand that their eating habit is going to cost them much more in health expenses
- dasil003 17y ago
  The big problem is farm subsidies for corn and soybeans. If they transferred those subsidies to produce we could make it significantly cheaper to eat healthy. However, if you are smart it's possible to eat much cheaper than McDonalds and almost infinitely healthier. The secret is just eat like they do in poor countries. Start with bulk quantities of some basic staples. I'm Brazilian, so for me it's rice and beans. Then buy veggies and meat that are on sale. Of course if you want it to taste good you have to learn to season and cook it properly, which takes time. I admit that corn syrup drinks, processed carbs and extremely fatty/salty/msg-y food tastes great and can be quite addictive. I sympathize with people who are stuck in that cycle. However I've found that how I feel from eating healthy and getting a reasonable amount of exercise is far more significant to me than something that tastes good for 5 mins while I eat it. I'm convinced if people were more in touch with their own bodies it wouldn't be hard to convince them to eat healthier. Unfortunately American culture itself is a huge impediment to this, which is why I'm so happy to see Michelle Obama planting a garden. Cultural change is what we need.
  - rglullis 17y ago
    (OT, but your profile info does not have an email.) From reading that, it seems that you are living in the US for quite some time. As a Brazilian living in Cambridge, MA, may I ask you where do you live now? There are lots of Brazilians in Mass, but I'm yet to find a fellow Brazilian hacker.
awt 17y ago
Doesn't everyone die? If so, isn't the question what diseases take the longest time to cause death, and thus require the most medical expenditure? Wouldn't medical expenses be lower if everyone died of a heart attack at 55? That would certainly be cheaper than living till 70 and treating cancer, bone loss issues, bladder issues, and cholesterol issues over a period of several years.
- dasil003 17y ago
  If so, isn't the question what diseases take the longest time to cause death, and thus require the most medical expenditure Not exactly. You're missing two variables. The rate of infection in the population as a whole, and the rate of expenditure to treat the disease.
  - hughprime 17y ago
    How so? The argument is that eventually everybody dies of something, so avoiding one fatal disease only shifts your death to another disease at some point in the future. I really think it's quite likely that fat people, on average, cost less in health care over their lives than thin people. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but every person who dies suddenly of a heart attack saves an awful lot of money by not dying of cancer, or worse still some degenerative disease.
    - dasil003 17y ago
      Nothing wrong with the basic gist, but read closely the statement I quoted. Just because something takes a long time to kill you doesn't mean its treatment is expensive. Similarly, just because something is expensive to treat doesn't mean enough people have it to make it worth targetting from an overall cost perspective. That's all I was saying.
      - eru 17y ago
        And if you get less deaths per person-years, you might also save money (per person-year).
edw519 17y ago
There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. All the more reason for each of us to take more personal responsibility for our food and our health. I wouldn't count on anyone else helping me much with either any time soon.
- Retric 17y ago
  Most health care spending in the US is caused by aging. Most heath care spending is paid for by the state, local, or federal government (50%+). Most heath care spending is caused by people living longer. Most heath care spending is caused by better and more expensive treatments that we did not have 100 years ago. Smokers have shorter lives and spend less on heath care over their lifetime. Smokers cause a huge short term spike in heath care costs. PS: There are plenty of ways of slicing it, but excluding sudden death we are all going to spend a lot of money on heath care and we are all going to die.
nova 17y ago
Yes, but before advocating any diet please read Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories". Please. The government already amplified a terrible mistake to colossal dimensions and could do it again.
wallflower 17y ago
A retired gastroenterologist once told me his personal theory: Every human can consume a finite amount of sugar in his/her lifetime - once you exceed that limit, you die. The theory is a bit flimsy but it makes you think about cumulative nutritional choices.
bokonist 17y ago
* and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. * Cancer and heart disease are fundamentally diseases of age. Everyone will die of one or the other eventually. The links to certain dietary elements are almost all a result of a data mining.
nradov 17y ago
We are digging our graves with our teeth. Caring for diabetes and related conditions consumes about 1/7 of all US healthcare spending (could be a little more or less depending on how you count). http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-statistics/cost-of-diabetes-in-us.jsp http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-statistics/cost-of-diabetes... The vast majority of type-2 diabetes cases could be prevented with better eating habits. If the incidence of preventable chronic diseases was greatly reduced, healthcare costs would be so low that we wouldn't be arguing over how to pay for it.
peregrine 17y ago
This is a poor headline. I'd say a better one would be. "Majority of US Healthcare Costs are Cause by Not Exercising enough to burn calories from Bad Eating Habits"
- xsmasher 17y ago
  Well, there is something slightly perverse about eating more food than you need, and then doing useless physical work to balance out the equation.
asciilifeform 17y ago
Why is there no mention of the artificially restricted supply of doctors? This fact plainly accounts for a large portion (if not the majority) of US health care costs.

48 points by jyu 17y ago

vijayr 17y ago

Isn't it the same everywhere (assuming there is no war or natural calamity etc like situation)?

anigbrowl 17y ago
Not necessarily. For example: http://library.thinkquest.org/16665/causes.htm http://library.thinkquest.org/16665/causes.htm <- leading causes of mortality in ~20 countries. Look at how big the variations between different countries can be even for coarsely-grained statistics.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

Are American eating habits really that significantly different from Canadian eating habits to explain the fact that the US spends twice as much per capita as Canada spends - notwithstanding the 50 million Americans without coverage?

ankeshk 17y ago
Comparing Canada vs USA obesity rates shows that YES indeed eating habits seem to be very different: http://eaves.ca/2008/07/08/fatness-index-canada-vs-united-states/ http://eaves.ca/2008/07/08/fatness-index-canada-vs-united-st...
- hughprime 17y ago
  If you look at the comments below the post, though, the comparison doesn't seem to be valid, due to different measurement methodologies.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  WOW. That's just astonishing - thanks for the link! I think it's definitely worth studying how two very similar societies can have such radically different obesity indicators.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  As a Canadian living in the USA I have to say, we don't eat that differently in Canada, the big difference is we eat less. Canada is just as full of greasy, nutrtionless, processed-to-hell food as America is, but we simply do not consume as much of it, from my observations. When I moved to the USA I immediately (over 4 months) gained a buttload of weight (both figuratively and literally...). This is due to my bad habit of finishing everything on my plate. I've since fixed this and my weight is rapidly decreasing. Yay. Serving sizes in the USA are simply ludicrous and completely out of step with reality. Before talking about high-fiber, low-fat diets, Americans need to do one simple (but difficult) thing: eat less. Eat way less. A friend and I (both Canadian) paid a visit to the Cheesecake Factory this last weekend - when our plates landed on our table our eyes bugged out. There was enough food to feed 4 people in a standard Canadian restaurant. I'm not even exaggerating :S The table next to ours polished their food single-handedly and then ordered dessert. We were shocked. How any single person can consume that much food in one sitting is unimaginable, and somewhat disgusting.
  - hughprime 17y ago
    Well, the Cheesecake Factory is a bit of an outlying case -- those portions are ridiculous even by American standards. But as an Australian living in the US I agree with you -- I find it hard just to get a normally-sized meal for breakfast or lunch. In Australia, if you order a ham and cheese sandwich, you get ham and cheese. In America if you order a ham and cheese sandwich you get a huge stack of ham, a bit of cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickles (!?), maybe some sprouts, mayo and a bright yellow mustard-like substance. If I tell them I just want ham and cheese they look at me like I'm crazy (and I am, cuz I'll be paying about six bucks for this sandwich anyway). On the other hand, last I heard Australian rates of obesity have overtaken US rates. On the other other hand, Australia probably has more of the slightly-fat people (ordinary folks with big beer guts) and fewer of the ridiculously-fat people (acres of waddling flesh or too-fat-to-walk electric wheelchair folks).
    - potatolicious 17y ago
      I've also found that Americans like to lather sauce over everything, which begs the question of if they'd realize if we replaced all their meat with soy protein. This may be part of the diet problem. In Canada we have ranch sauce, we have mayo, but it wasn't until I got to the US that I started seeing these things going on everything under the sun, in gigantic quantities. Why have the ham sandwich if all you'll be tasting is the mayo?
pchivers 17y ago
As a Canadian who visits the United States often, I can definitely say the portion sizes are a lot larger in the United States. Every time I go to the US I go into a state of shock when I see the portion sizes. You would think that after 20-30 trips to US I would have learned to adjust my expectations by now, but it is still amazing to me to witness how much food Americans eat no matter how many times I see it.
- tjr 17y ago
  I once offered to pick up some "Chinese food" for some colleagues visiting the US from China. They didn't recognize anything on the menu, and ended up ordering the "house special", with grilled chicken, vegetables, and rice. Reasonably healthy, from the looks of it. About an hour after getting our food, I remarked that they had not finished what they ordered. "This is too much food for us; we can't eat it all!" they explained. "It's too much for us too," I assured them, "but we eat it all anyway."
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    For the most part, "Chinese food" (served outside china) is an attempt by Chinese resturaunters to cater to the tastes of locals. So a better description of what you had was "American Chinese Food". If you ever have the opportunity, try Indian Chinese Food. It's fantastic.

hughprime 17y ago

The headline "Majority US Healthcare Costs Are Caused by Bad Eating Habits" is not the headline of the article, nor is this supposed fact stated anywhere in the article. I very much doubt it's true, and I don't think it's well-defined enough to even be false.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 17y ago
(...) the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet. This is a key argument in the article and the headline seems like a reasonable paraphrase of that.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  At the minimum, a lack of physical activity has to be included as a factor in this along side diet.
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    Haven't you heard? The new wisdom is that exercise makes you even fatter. Well, I exaggerate, but I'm referring to a recent Time story saying 'exercise won't make you thin' (the idea being that you still need to eat less or you'll just get hungrier and never lose weight). You are quite right, but 'pin the tail on the donkey' seems to sell better :-/
    - ars 17y ago
      It's not actually new wisdom. We are just going back to what we knew 40 years ago. Basically, between 1960 and 2009 we thought exercise will make you thinner. Outside those times exercise was thought to increase appetite.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

thesecret 17y ago

I work in healthcare and this is my understanding from the responses of patients that I encounter - fast food is cheap. One of the families I work with, both parents are diabetic and the children are all overweight. I asked them about their eating habit and the answer was : McDonalds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Why? Because it's cheap to eat at McDonalds for a family of 4 than it is to buy vegetables at the market....for 3 bucks, you get a whole meal for one person. $3 at Safeway, you only get..a cabbage and some tomatoes? They didn't understand that their eating habit is going to cost them much more in health expenses

dasil003 17y ago
The big problem is farm subsidies for corn and soybeans. If they transferred those subsidies to produce we could make it significantly cheaper to eat healthy. However, if you are smart it's possible to eat much cheaper than McDonalds and almost infinitely healthier. The secret is just eat like they do in poor countries. Start with bulk quantities of some basic staples. I'm Brazilian, so for me it's rice and beans. Then buy veggies and meat that are on sale. Of course if you want it to taste good you have to learn to season and cook it properly, which takes time. I admit that corn syrup drinks, processed carbs and extremely fatty/salty/msg-y food tastes great and can be quite addictive. I sympathize with people who are stuck in that cycle. However I've found that how I feel from eating healthy and getting a reasonable amount of exercise is far more significant to me than something that tastes good for 5 mins while I eat it. I'm convinced if people were more in touch with their own bodies it wouldn't be hard to convince them to eat healthier. Unfortunately American culture itself is a huge impediment to this, which is why I'm so happy to see Michelle Obama planting a garden. Cultural change is what we need.
- rglullis 17y ago
  (OT, but your profile info does not have an email.) From reading that, it seems that you are living in the US for quite some time. As a Brazilian living in Cambridge, MA, may I ask you where do you live now? There are lots of Brazilians in Mass, but I'm yet to find a fellow Brazilian hacker.

awt 17y ago

Doesn't everyone die? If so, isn't the question what diseases take the longest time to cause death, and thus require the most medical expenditure? Wouldn't medical expenses be lower if everyone died of a heart attack at 55? That would certainly be cheaper than living till 70 and treating cancer, bone loss issues, bladder issues, and cholesterol issues over a period of several years.

dasil003 17y ago
If so, isn't the question what diseases take the longest time to cause death, and thus require the most medical expenditure Not exactly. You're missing two variables. The rate of infection in the population as a whole, and the rate of expenditure to treat the disease.
- hughprime 17y ago
  How so? The argument is that eventually everybody dies of something, so avoiding one fatal disease only shifts your death to another disease at some point in the future. I really think it's quite likely that fat people, on average, cost less in health care over their lives than thin people. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but every person who dies suddenly of a heart attack saves an awful lot of money by not dying of cancer, or worse still some degenerative disease.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    Nothing wrong with the basic gist, but read closely the statement I quoted. Just because something takes a long time to kill you doesn't mean its treatment is expensive. Similarly, just because something is expensive to treat doesn't mean enough people have it to make it worth targetting from an overall cost perspective. That's all I was saying.
    - eru 17y ago
      And if you get less deaths per person-years, you might also save money (per person-year).

edw519 17y ago

There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. All the more reason for each of us to take more personal responsibility for our food and our health. I wouldn't count on anyone else helping me much with either any time soon.

Retric 17y ago
Most health care spending in the US is caused by aging. Most heath care spending is paid for by the state, local, or federal government (50%+). Most heath care spending is caused by people living longer. Most heath care spending is caused by better and more expensive treatments that we did not have 100 years ago. Smokers have shorter lives and spend less on heath care over their lifetime. Smokers cause a huge short term spike in heath care costs. PS: There are plenty of ways of slicing it, but excluding sudden death we are all going to spend a lot of money on heath care and we are all going to die.

nova 17y ago

Yes, but before advocating any diet please read Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories". Please. The government already amplified a terrible mistake to colossal dimensions and could do it again.

wallflower 17y ago

A retired gastroenterologist once told me his personal theory: Every human can consume a finite amount of sugar in his/her lifetime - once you exceed that limit, you die. The theory is a bit flimsy but it makes you think about cumulative nutritional choices.

bokonist 17y ago

* and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. * Cancer and heart disease are fundamentally diseases of age. Everyone will die of one or the other eventually. The links to certain dietary elements are almost all a result of a data mining.

nradov 17y ago

We are digging our graves with our teeth. Caring for diabetes and related conditions consumes about 1/7 of all US healthcare spending (could be a little more or less depending on how you count). http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-statistics/cost-of-diabetes-in-us.jsp http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-statistics/cost-of-diabetes... The vast majority of type-2 diabetes cases could be prevented with better eating habits. If the incidence of preventable chronic diseases was greatly reduced, healthcare costs would be so low that we wouldn't be arguing over how to pay for it.

peregrine 17y ago

This is a poor headline. I'd say a better one would be. "Majority of US Healthcare Costs are Cause by Not Exercising enough to burn calories from Bad Eating Habits"

xsmasher 17y ago
Well, there is something slightly perverse about eating more food than you need, and then doing useless physical work to balance out the equation.

asciilifeform 17y ago

Why is there no mention of the artificially restricted supply of doctors? This fact plainly accounts for a large portion (if not the majority) of US health care costs.