The numbers
are staggering!
Six-hundred forty-one
million people, globally, are now overweight or obese. Four-hundred fifty million people, worldwide,
are now afflicted with Type 2 diabetes -- which we know often results from
being obese. The healthcare cost of Type 2 diabetes was 825 billion dollars in
2014. Annual costs from obesity have
been estimated between 147 to 210 billion dollars – these are just direct
costs; indirect costs from things like work absenteeism, lower productivity at
work, poorer performance in the military, heart disease, and certain cancers,
for example, add billions more to obesity-associated costs.
Moreover,
according to the experts, all increases have occurred in the past 35--40 years,
obesity up from 105 million persons in 1970 and Type 2 diabetes nearly doubled
for men and 60% higher for women since 1980.
The
investigations that have been done on obesity and Type 2 diabetes prevalence
and incidence and costs, most likely, demanded a lot of hard work and
coordinated efforts from the organizations and numerous researchers, worldwide,
who sought to provide the world with this crucial information.
Many more
experts are incredibly busy trying to figure out how to decrease prevalence and
incidence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes and on how to cope with symptoms and effects of these diseases as well as the massive
burden of costs.
I’m very
grateful for all this work from all the experts. Surely, people are getting and feeling better and through the many and
varied efforts, both singular and coordinated, the occurrence of obesity has to
flatten, if not decrease – it has to!
Among the
many studies, though, there is one group of people that I’ve yet to see a large, robust or
coordinated study from (vs. just about) -- overweight and obese people themselves!
Wouldn’t it
be great to get a really good data set from a representative sample of the 641
overweight/obese million people or, dare I say, from as many of the 641 million folks
as possible in order to glean some insights on how they would like to best treat and prevent the occurrence of
obesity. I’m very curious to know the kinds of information that can be
generated from a large, coordinated, well-constructed study of obese
individuals from one of the many well-funded, influential obesity-focused
organizations, centers, think-tanks, team of researchers, or departments from
universities, asking obese persons questions like:
- How do you think you became overweight/obese?
- How would you like to be treated for your obesity? What treatment do you think would best help you lose weight and keep it off, for good?
4. How do you think we can best deal with the obesity epidemic? What do you think we need to
do?
5. How do you think we can best prevent obesity from happening?
Feel free to contact me with your thoughts or comments.
Mary-Jo, :) RDN, MSc, MMSc ACC
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