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Originally Posted by barrowaj
Having obese Americans hurts America itself, not just the people who are overweight. You are exactly right about why people are fat. But its important to do something about it. Obesity is a disease, and should be treated as such. You could make the same claim about AIDS, and say that most people get AIDs because they sleep around and use IV drugs.
Anyway, we could try to do somehting about obesity by trying to encourage people to exercise and to eat right. Implementing some kind of incentive wouldn't cost us very much, and would certainly cost less than the problem of obesity if left alone.
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Obesity is detrimental to our society. According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), obesity in adults has increased by 60% within the past twenty years and obesity in children has tripled in the past thirty years. A staggering 33% of American adults are obese and obesity-related deaths have climbed to more than 300,000 a year, second only to tobacco-related deaths.
Now, imagine if those deaths and hospitalizations had been averted (which is possible). That means that the American health care system would not be caught holding the bag on all these obese people. Medical costs would probably be lower, and insurance costs would also drop.
Many obese people are essentially parasitic. They lack the 'will-power' (philosophical question of free will aside) to take control of the bodies. Thus, they consume the limited amount of healthcare services and resources. Imagine if every obesity-related hospitalization was spent on a more dire need, such as someone with a disease or traumatic injury.
The less obese people, the better.