All You Can Eat

This all seems funny until you consider that collectively, Americans are roughly one billion pounds overweight. The cost of obesity-related illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control, has doubled over the last decade, to about $147 billion a year. If you don’t believe me, go to the CDC’s website, where you will find an animated stat graph that shows how obesity levels in this country have exploded since 1985. The spread of intensity looks like a bad flu outbreak. Only it’s something we are doing to ourselves, one bite at a time.

Obviously, the government isn’t really interested in doing anything about this or else the USDA wouldn’t be infested with executives from the food industry. When the people who are advising the country on nutrition are also the ones putting high-fructose corn syrup into everything we eat, you know we’re on our own. But what boggles me the most is that the life & health industry doesn’t have more to say about all of this. For an industry that purports to feel the pain of a life insurance claimant’s family, or takes pride in delivering healthcare solutions to the public, it is strangely quiet on the subject of obesity and nutrition. It doesn’t take a genius to see that obesity and its related illnesses are probably the greatest underwriting and claims challenge this industry has faced in living memory. But the industry’s lack of public awareness and activism on this suggests a certain level of apathy. Personally, I’d like to think that life & health executives are all physically fit. After all, if they can’t be bothered to take good care of themselves, how can they be expected to take care of anybody else?

In the meantime, people absolutely have to rethink their relationship with food. A good first step would be to stop treating things like the Nathan’s Famous event as a sport and see it for what it really is: a symptom.