How does it affect health-care costs?

Obesity adds between $147 billion and $210 billion to annual U.S. health-care expenses, increasing an average adult’s medical costs by 42 percent—an estimated $200,000 over a lifetime. This burden hits low-income households hardest, creating a vicious cycle of poverty leading to poor dietary habits leading to costly weight-related illness. Expenses range from basics like insulin, which is used to treat diabetes and costs up to $900 a month, to the increased need for expensive interventions such as heart surgery. Medicaid now covers bariatric surgery, because doctors believe a roughly $25,000 stomach-shrinking procedure is cheaper than a lifetime of chronic-disease treatments.