Obesity to worsen, weigh heavily on healthcare costs

- Obesity is most widespread in Britain and the United States among the world's leading economies and if present trends continue, about half of both men and women in the United States will be obese by 2030, health experts warned on Friday.Obesity is fast replacing tobacco as the single most important preventablecause of chronic non-communicable diseases, and will add an extra 7.8 million cases of diabetes, 6.8 million cases of heart disease and stroke, and 539,000 cases of cancer in the United States by 2030.
Some 32 percent of men and 35 percent of women are now obese in the United States, according to a research team led by Claire Wang at the Mailman School of Public Health in Columbia University in New York. They published their findings in a special series of four papers on obesity in The Lancet.
In Britain, obesity rates will balloon to between 41-48 percent for men and 35-43 percent for women by 2030 from what is now 26 percent for both sexes, they warned.
"An extra 668,000 cases of diabetes, 461,000 of heart disease and 130,000 cancer cases would result," they wrote               .Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn)