Several weeks ago I wrote about the high cost of being fat. I shared how I’ve spent $4500 over the past four years because I’m overweight. Since that post, I’ve been working with Lauren Muney, a wellness coach (about which more later). This morning, Muney sent me a New York Times article by Damon Darlin which describes how extra weight leads to higher costs.
Being fat costs money — tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime. Heavy people do not spend more than normal-size people on food, but their life insurance premiums are two to four times as large. They can expect higher medical expenses, and they tend to make less money and accumulate less wealth in their shortened lifetimes. They can have a harder time being hired, and then a harder time winning plum assignments and promotions.
Darlin’s article does a great job of summarizing the financial impact of being overweight. It’s these financial costs (resulting from health problems) that most worry me about being fat. Many find fat people unattractive, but I’m not one of them: I was raised in a family where fat was the norm, and it does not bother me. But the health risks and the associated costs do bother me.
For example, Darlin cites a study from the University of Wisconsin which demonstrated that by supersizing a fast-food order (at an average cost of 67 cents) leads to $6.64 in future medical costs for an obese man, and $3.46 in future medical costs for an obese woman. Super-sizing does not save money.
Many people do find the overweight unattractive, and consciously or not, they treat them differently. There is a social cost to being fat. (More here.) Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that “weight bias”, discrimination against the obese, is at least as strong as race bias. (The article points to Harvard University’s Implicit Association Test, where you can check your own internal biases.)
Studies have also demonstrated that there’s a direct correlation between obesity and net worth. The heavier the person, the less they earn. My initial reaction is that it’s impossible to determine which is the cause and which is the effect — does obesity lead to low net worth, or does low net worth lead to obesity? — but apparently this is a known problem with the research. Regardless, significant weight loss can lead to an increase in wealth.
A baby boomer whose [Body Mass Index (B.M.I.)] drops from 27.5, the middle of the overweight category, to 21.7, the middle of the normal category, sees an increase in wealth of $4,085.
Since first writing about my weight problem in October, I’ve made tremendous progress. This is largely due to Muney, a reader of this site. She wrote that because I had helped her make progress on her wealth, she’d like to help me make progress on my health. After working with her for a month, the results have been outstanding. I’ve lost weight. But more than that I feel great: my physical and mental well-being are the best they’ve been in years.
I look forward to continued progress, and to removing myself from the risks and costs associated with obesity. Right now, I’m going for a walk!
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[...] Save Money If you think about the food you eat when you’re in a pinch, you often pay for the price of convenience. You can spend 2-3 times what you’d normally pay for the same items. Another common theme among quick and easy foods is they’re not very healthy. As JD talks about today there are definite costs of being overweight, tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime. [...]
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Aww, Harvard says I hate fat people. Harvard is on the money.
It seems like there’d be other factors too than just weight and wealth, like education and physical/mental activity. I doubt you could ever determine causality.
I believe that for some people, obesity is a physical manifestation of mental defect, and I’m not talking about Prader-Willi syndrome or any other hypothalamus disorder. Three of the seven deadly sins connotate fatness. But anyway, that’s all a can of worms I’m not about to delve into, but maybe someone will read your blog, see this comment, and perform research that leads them to a Nobel Prize
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Now, that’s in the US mostly and could be applied to most other first world country out there. But for developing countries it’s a completely different story. Most people are lightly obese or overweight, and most of those who are obese/overweight are in the upper echelons of society.
The poor basically can’t get enough food to even stop being underweight.
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JD – Congratulations on the weight loss, and on the corresponding mental boost. That’s the kind of commitment it’s easy to make, but hard to follow through on. Keep it up!
Also, I wanted to say that Damon Darlin is the man.
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With regards to the social costs of obesity, there may be other factors involved such as lower energy levels and more sick days.
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Some reasons why this may work the other way:
-Among cultural/ethnic groups that historically have had lower socioeconomic status, cooking methods like deep-frying became widely used because they made the cheapest cuts of meat, like chicken feet, more palatable.
-People with lower incomes may have to work more hours, increasing their reliance on fast food rather than healthier home-cooked meals.
-The produce at grocery stores in low-income areas is, to put it bluntly, skeezy. Organic produce and gym memberships are upper-middle-class priviledges.
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BMI is a weak indicator of physical fitness and health, and that chart is a weak indicator of the effect obesity has on net worth.
It would be much more informative to compare net worth vs. BMI for people with similar jobs, education, race, marital status. The only way to tell how much body mass matters is to make body mass the only variable in the comparison.
Social science can’t necessarily find cause and effect, but it CAN do better than that chart.
For whatever it’s worth, I’m not in the age cohort of that graph (5 years too young) but my BMI has been in the “obese” category all my life–and my net worth is nearly three times that of the median value for the “normal” grouping.
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This article is interesting, but obviously as with any research must be taken subjectively. The work shows that there is a positive correlation between a person’s net worth and their BMI. BMI is somewhat flawed, a body-builder will likely have a high BMI, but will be healthy. However, there are far, far, far fewer body-builders than there are obese persons in the industrialized world, so the BMI scale is not skewed by them.
Furthermore, the study does not seem to account for socio-economic factors, it is a simplistic study. It is true that lower-income people have a more positive correlation to BMI/obesity in Western societies.
This article also shows how diabetes, a disease associated to high carbohydrate diets, is linked to lower income. The reason for this is that people with lower income often seek less-expensive, more calorie-dense foods which are not as healthy and are low in fiber.
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This is very interesting. I would have to say though that poverty does tend to bring on weight gain.
-People go on government assistance and in most states, that controls what you can and can’t buy. Premium foods are not available in many states on their assistance programs, leading to a less healthy lifestyle.
-Stress is high for poor people, which leads to weight gain.
-Poor people don’t have the money to spend on gyms.
-The poor tend to be undereducated, and being educated about what foods are good and which are bad is part of that. Some people probably don’t even understand their caloric intake vs. caloric burn.
-Next time you fix a healthy meal, calculate the cost of it. Chances are, it cost 2 to 10 times what an unhealthy meal would have cost. Healthy foods are more expensive, there’s no doubt about that. Fix a meal representing all the food groups, then compare that to a $2 microwave dinner or a can of Ravioli, which is what poor people buy because they can’t afford the fresh foods.
-Ever heard of the “freshman 15″ when entering college? I gained some weight through college because I survived on a part-time job while I was going to school full-time. When I was in college, there was NO way I could have afforded a nice healthy meal every day or even once a week. That was way out of my price range. Thankfully, now that I have a good job, I can afford healthy foods and I have lost most of the weight. I most definitely attribute most of the weight gain to simply not being able to afford healthy foods. I remember scarfing down food when we would have parties at work or church pot-luck dinners because there was no telling when the next time would be that I would have meat and vegetables.
You people really shouldn’t be so quick to judge.
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I heard a couple of people talking about http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2006/12/02/extra-weight-higher-costs/ on the subway today. I love it!
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