An avid birdy by the name of Laura send us a link that explains that solving obesity does not save the government money because those people live longer and require more health expenditures.

I did a little researching and found the actual published paper. Read it here.

The authors conclude:

Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.

That’s unfortunate given our debate on protecting people from their own eating habits. Survival of the fit-ist anyone? More like survival of the most expensive.

[pic credits]

Popularity: 15% [?]