Healthy Bytes

Supersize it for 67 cents now and $6.64 later

read time: 369 words, about 2 minutes

There’s an article in The New York Times about the cost of being overweight.

Interesting article that looks both at medical costs and social costs.

Was any of it surprising? Some interesting numbers, but in general not surprising.
At this point, don’t we all know being overweight leads to more medical issues. Perhaps more specifically - eating the kinds of stuff that typically leads to packing on pounds, as well as the weight itself, compromises health and quality of life.

So what does it take to effect change?
We haven’t peaked on the weight gain thing. The percentage of Americans overweight and obese - including children - is still rising. And overweight adults seem to acknowledge the cause and effect relationship. But they’re not successfully changing the cause. Perhaps they don’t try. Perhaps they don’t know how. Perhaps the relationship between cause and effect isn’t immediate or transparent enough to motivate change.

Rachel N. Close and Dale A. Schoeller, nutritional scientists at University of Wisconsin, Madison better quantified the cost of “supersizing” a meal. In their research The Financial Reality of Overeating they calculated the additional medical and food cost burden a person would have in the year following a supersized versus a regular fast-food meal. The premise being it takes more calories (food) to maintain more weight. Ex: eating 2,500 calories a day costs more than 2,000 calories a day. And higher medical costs are associated with the added weight.

Costs and calorie data used was an average of 3 different fast-food meal offerings.

The cost you pay at the counter to supersize is 67 cents. That meal adds an additional 397 calories which becomes 36 grams of fat tissue to the ‘diner’ (for the purpose of the research).

The next year food and medical costs for 36 more grams of fat was calculated as $6.64 for a man and $3.46 for a woman. So for a man, roughly 10 x more in food and medical costs than meal upgrade cost. For a woman, roughly 5 x more.

Would you choose to not supersize that meal if it cost $7.31 or $4.07 more rather than 67 cents more?

This entry was posted on Wed, 6.Dec.2006 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Obesity, Eating, Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.