According to an exclusive Washington Examiner report last week, the House GOP warned that obesity will cost Americans up to $9.1 trillion in medical costs over the next decade. This is over double last year’s estimate and an increase of over $7 billion per year.
A report from 2021 called obesity a major public health crisis, and it’s only gotten worse since then. One in five children is reportedly obese, and one in four adults tips the scale with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or over. Granted, BMI is not a perfect measurement and its merits can be debated, but one doesn’t really need exacting science to see that America is fat. Really fat.
And while the report includes both direct and indirect costs such as treatments for asthma, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, they are likely missing other veiled costs.
Whole Person Health
The report’s numbers, while staggering, don’t include the number of people seeking treatment for mental health conditions that many doctors won’t link to obesity. Western medicine is famous for addressing health care, like government, in silos of “expertise” without looking at the person as a holistic, symbiotic organism with a body, mind, and soul. Traditional medical training encourages students to choose areas of “expertise” like the heart or the brain or the gut without a single consideration that all these things are connected.
For example, a study from 2018 was partly responsible for discovering what has become known as “hope molecules” or mytokines that
