Summary |
Americans’ growing obesity is self-evident on any street corner in any city in the country. The extra poundage Americans are packing is apparent in the growing percentage of people with overhanging guts and ballooning buttocks, as well as in the number who are turning to three-wheeled electric scooters for mobility around their homes and in stores for a sad reason: they can to longer carry their own weight for more than a few yards. In no small way-no, in very BIG and surprising ways-America has become the home of heavies!
A mountain of scholarly studies have documented without doubt that the fattening of America is undercutting worker productivity, lowering wages, and impairing the country’s international competitiveness. Excess weight and obesity are increasing both medical and health insurance costs, expanding the number of Americans who can no longer afford private health insurance, truncating many Americans’ life expectancy, and offsetting the benefits of tremendous advancements in medical technologies and treatments. Paramedic firms are reinforcing their ambulances and gurneys, enabling their “bariatric rescue squads” to handle a decidedly modern peak-load problem, patients who weight more than half a ton. And this is just a partial list of the effects of overweight.
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