The Guardian said that “governments around the world need to make immediate and dramatic policy changes to reverse a pandemic of obesity”. The Independent reported that by 2030 there will be 26 million people in the UK who are obese - a rise of 73% from the current 15 million. The Daily Mail reported that women will be close behind, “with four in ten similarly overweight” by that year.
In the UK, past trends predicted that by 2030 the prevalence of obesity would rise from 26% to 41-48% in men, and from 26% to 35-43% in women. This would equate to 11 million more obese adults by 2030, 3.3 million of whom would be older than 60.
In both the US and UK, the rise in obesity is expected to be associated with an extra 6 to 8.5 million cases of diabetes, 5.7 to 7.3 million cases of heart disease and stroke, and between 492,000 and 669,000 additional cases of cancer. In addition, the increasing prevalence of debilitating disorders such as osteoarthritis would affect the duration of the person’s healthy lifespan.
Medical costs associated with treatment of these chronic diseases are estimated to increase by $48-66 billion per year in the US, and by £1.9-2 billion per year in the UK by 2030. Regarding economic effects of lost work productivity, the researchers say that the shortage of consistent and high-quality data prevents comparisons between countries. However, using estimates from the US 2008 National Health and Wellness study they estimated that by 2030 there would be a loss of 1.7 – 3 million productive person-years among working-age US adults. This would be associated with an economic cost as high as $390–580 billion.
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2011/08August/Pages/half-of-uk-predicted-to-be-obese-by-2030.aspx
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