Overweight & Obesity

Overweight & Obesity

"Obesity is a rapidly escalating problem throughout the world. There has been an especially alarming increase in the United States since 1990, as reported by Nelson et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association) JAMA ., involving both genders and all ethnic and socioeconomic groups. It was recently reported in JAMA that 56% of US adults are overweight, 19.8% are obese, and 7.3% have diabetes. In light of what we clinicians see each day in our offices, it is no surprise there are 320,000 premature deaths in the United states each year due to obesity, 900 people die daily due to this disease, which comes to 38 victims per hour or one death every 100 seconds!!

Dr. Walter Willett, Harvard Medial School nutrition researcher3 , notes “...a healthy diet teamed up with regular exercise and no smoking can eliminate 80 percent of heart disease and 70 percent of some cancers...” He continues,”...next to whether you smoke, the number that stares at you from the bathroom scale is the most important measure of your future health.”

Recent National Institute of Health data confirms that 15.6 million adults have type 2 diabetes, with 90-95% of these cases being overweight or obese. The prevalence of hypertension in obese adults is 38.4% for men and 32.3% for women. The prevalence of high blood cholesterol in the overweight/obese population is 19% among men and 28% among women. Heavier individuals are at increase risk for some types of cancer including uterine, colorectal, gallbladder, and kidney cancer. Almost half of post-menopausal women diagnosed with breast cancer are obese. All of these factors added together lead to a 50-100% increased risk of death from all causes for obese individuals compared with those of normal body weight. Information released by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) indicates that at least 47 million American adults, more than one in five, are affected by Metabolic Syndrome4 (also known as Syndrome X), a disorder that includes upper body obesity, hypertension, elevated triglycerides, low HDL, insulin resistance and glucose intolerance.

Obviously, the cost of obesity is extraordinarily high. Psychologically, it is well documented that obesity seriously impairs patients from reaching personal and professional goals. Obese people often have serious problems with self-esteem. The obesity-related medical costs estimated by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences were in excess of $99 billion last year. The direct cost was $51.5 billion, representing 5.6% of the U.S. health expenditure and the indirect cost was $47.6 billion, comparable to the economic costs of cigarette smoking. The cost of pharmaceuticals required by the typical obese adult can be overwhelming. A survey conducted in my office e indicated that a typical patient with severe obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), and type 2 diabetes could easily spend $418 per month on prescription drugs. This amounts to $5016 per year and more than $50,000 in a decade."

The previous 4 paragraphs are from the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) Internet Forum - AUG 2002 and are written by Scott Rigden M.D. and Barbara Schiltz R.N., M.A.