Tag: "obesity"

Why You Are Fat; Or Not Fat

The hypothalamus, which monitors the body’s available energy supply, is at the center of the brain’s snack-food signal processing. It keeps track of how much long-term energy is stored in fat by detecting levels of the fat-derived hormone leptin — and it also monitors the body’s levels of blood glucose, minute-to-minute, along with other metabolic fuels and hormones that influence satiety. When you eat a cookie, the hypothalamus sends out signals that make you less hungry. Conversely, when food is restricted, the hypothalamus sends signals that increase your desire to ingest high-calorie foods. The hypothalamus is also wired to other brain areas that control taste, reward, memory, emotion and higher-level decision making. These brain regions form an integrated circuit that was designed to control the drive to eat.

Source: The New York Times.

May 09, 2013 | 11 comments | by

Who Pays For Obesity?

A common starting point is the assertion that those who are obese impose higher health costs on the rest of the population — a statement which is then taken to justify public policy interventions…We will argue that the existing literature on these topics suggests that obese people on average do bear the costs and benefits of their eating and exercise habits. We begin by estimating the lifetime costs of obesity. We then discuss the extent to which private health insurance pools together obese and thin, whether health insurance causes obesity, and whether being fat might actually cause positive externalities for those who are not obese. If public policy to reduce obesity is not justified on the grounds of external costs imposed on others, then the remaining potential justification would need to be on the basis of helping people to address problems of ignorance or self-control that lead to obesity…

Oops. There goes the whole reason for Mayor Bloomberg’s soda ban and his call for a soda tax. The study. HT: Jason Shafrin.

Apr 22, 2013 | 10 comments | by

Fattest Regions in the U.S., and Other Links

Where do the fattest people in the U.S. live? Hint: it’s not the South.

Do apple-shaped people get more kidney disease?

People are less likely to trust and follow the advice of a fat doctor.

Why you can’t eat only one potato chip.

Apr 15, 2013 | 11 comments | by

Weight Loss Therapy a Bargain for Medicare

Emory Professor, Kenneth Thorpe, examines the costs of treating obesity-related conditions and found medications that help Medicare enrollees lose weight could save money for Medicare in the long term.

Permanent weight loss of 10 to 15% will yield $9,445 to $15,987 in gross per capita savings throughout their lifetime, and $8,070 to $13,474 over ten years. Similarly, initial weight loss of 10 to 15% followed by 90% weight regain will result in gross per capita savings of $7,556 to $11,109 over their lifetime, and $6,456 to $8,911 over ten years. Targeting weight loss medications to adults with obesity (BMI ≥ 30) produces greater savings to the Medicare program.

Apr 05, 2013 | 10 comments | by

Exercise Matters

There are four key patterns of results that emerge. First, the lagged effect of physical activity is almost always larger than the current effect. This suggests that current risk factors, not only obesity but also high blood pressure and heart rate, take years to develop, which underscores the importance of consistent physical activity to ward off heart disease. Second, we find that in general physical activity reduces risk factors for heart disease even after controlling, to some extent, for unobservable confounding influences. Third, not only recreational but work-related physical activity appears to protect against heart disease. Finally, there is evidence of a dose-response relationship such that higher levels of recreational exercise and other physical activity have a greater protective effect. Our estimates of the contemporaneous and durable effects suggest that the observed declines in high levels of recreational exercise and other physical activity can potentially account for between 12-30% of the increase in obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease observed over the sample period, ceteris paribus.

Source: NBER Working Paper.

Mar 08, 2013 | 10 comments | by

Three Oreo Cookies a Day

That’s all it takes to make us fat. From Timothy Taylor at the Conversable Economist:

The rise in American rates of obesity can be traced back to what seems like a fairly small rise in daily calories consumed, I learned this lesson from an article on the causes of obesity about 10 years back in my own Journal of Economic Perspectives. In “Why Have Americans Become More Obese?” David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser and Jesse M. Shapiro wrote that the “10- to 12-pound increase in median weight we observe in the past two decades requires a net caloric imbalance of about 100 to 150 calories per day. These calorie numbers are strikingly small. One hundred and fifty calories per day is three Oreo cookies or one can of Pepsi. It is about a mile and a half of walking.”

Feb 27, 2013 | 11 comments | by

Chemicals that Lead to More and Larger Fat Cells, and Other Links

Can a single drop of an endocrine-disrupting chemical cause us to be fat?

“[T]his is a president who still has not had Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton to dinner…“

For the seemingly healthy, annual physicals provide no benefit.

European scientists building an artificial brain.

Health savings accounts grow to $15.5 billion in 2012.

Jan 31, 2013 | 10 comments | by

Healthy Behaviors Improve Your Self-Control, and Other Links

Teach yourself willpower.

Forty percent of baby girls will live to be 100!

Which is worse: Snoring, smoking, high cholesterol or being overweight? You’ll be surprised.

Penicillin — not the pill — launched the sexual revolution.

Preschool boosts IQ by four points or more.

Jan 30, 2013 | 6 comments | by

Why Are We Obsessing on Wellness?

Heresy at Health Affairs:

Virtually unheard of thirty years ago, workplace wellness is now embedded in large self-insured companies. These firms pay their workers an average of $460/year to participate in worksite wellness programs. Further, wellness is deeply enough engrained in the public policy consciousness to have earned a prominent place in the Affordable Care Act, which allows large employers to tie a significant percentage of health spending to employee health behavior and provides direct subsidies for small businesses to undertake these workplace wellness programs.

Yet the implausible, disproven, and often mathematically impossible claims of success underlying the “get well quick” programs promoted by the wellness industry raise many questions about the wisdom of these decisions and policies.

So why are we doing this? I proposed an answer in Priceless: wellness programs attract employees who are already healthy and repel those who aren’t.

Jan 17, 2013 | 5 comments | by

Being Overweight = Longer Life + Higher Medical Bills

Re: last week’s finding that overweight people may live longer. Here’s the rest of the story:

“The study looked at quantity of life, not quality of life, and that’s a very important distinction,” noted Dana Goldman, director of the University of Southern California’s Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.

A higher body mass index — a standard measure for determining whether people are overweight or obese — is associated with a number of chronic illnesses, including diabetes, heart disease and hypertension. These chronic illnesses are expensive to treat. If, as it now turns out, overweight people are living longer in addition to racking up more chronic illnesses, that means Medicare is on the hook for paying for more expensive people for more years.

Catherine Rampell. Critique of the study here. A defense of fat here.

Jan 09, 2013 | 5 comments | by
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