{"id":1843,"date":"2010-04-13T10:12:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T14:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/04\/13\/obesity-and-health-care\/"},"modified":"2010-04-26T08:35:11","modified_gmt":"2010-04-26T12:35:11","slug":"obesity-and-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/04\/13\/obesity-and-health-care\/","title":{"rendered":"Obesity and health care"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I was at the North Country Symposium<\/a> in Canton, where community leaders were invited to speak to their colleagues.<\/p>\n

David Acker<\/a>, CEO of Canton-Potsdam Hospital, was given the floor for about 10 minutes. While he did touch on the likely effects of health care legislation on the region (“relationships will need to be restructured”, he saved the lion’s share of his time for one topic.<\/p>\n

Obesity and nutrition.<\/p>\n

Acker reminded us that St. Lawrence County ranks 59th of New York’s 62 counties in an index of health indicators, obesity high among them<\/a>. He said at a time of deep budget cuts, treating the range of illnesses obese people deal with is pulling precious resources away from schools, other types of health care, roads, you name it…<\/p>\n

Acker on obesity and health care<\/a><\/p>\n

The scary thing is that from 1980 to 2000, even as warnings about being overweight grew into shrill cries of alarm, the number of obese Americans doubled. Only in the last few years has the curve leveled out.<\/p>\n

Rising political star Marc Ambinder has a long-form, first-person narrative in this month’s Atlantic Monthly magazine<\/a> about America’s largely losing battle against obesity, and its effect on our health care system:<\/p>\n

Obese Americans spend about 42 percent more than healthy-weight people on medical care each year. Improper weight and diet strongly correlate with chronic diseases, which account for three-fourths of all health-care spending. Type 2 diabetes is one of the leading drivers of rising costs for Medicare patients, and 60 percent of cases result directly from weight gain. In short, even as the nation is convulsed by a political struggle to \u201creform\u201d health care, no effort to contain its costs is likely to succeed if we can\u2019t beat obesity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What do you see in your neighborhood? Are you aware of nutrition\/anti-obesity campaigns? Do you approve or find them offensive<\/a>? What do you think of Michele Obama’s childhood Obesity Summit<\/a>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, I was at the North Country Symposium in Canton, where community leaders were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1843"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1887,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843\/revisions\/1887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}