A major new study has found that the average obese Briton costs the health service at least £1,000 in healthcare costs each year.
People considered very obese, with a BMI of over 40, cost the NHS around £5,000 per person due to health problems related to their weight.
The research by the firm Lane, Clark & Peacock (LCP), discovered that, Like the average British waist size, the problem only seems to be getting worse with time.
The average annual cost of treating the most severely obese Britons has risen from £1,300 in 2015 to £1,900 in 2019, the final year of study.
It is thought that this is because people live longer due to better treatment methods and therefore need care for longer.
By specific health condition, heart failure was the most expensive per patient, costing just over £3,650, and £4,320 across weight classes. This was followed by kidney disease, costing between £2,900 and almost £4,200, and cardiovascular disease, costing almost £2,700, just under £3,500.
Hospital admissions for obese Britons were the biggest expense, followed by prescriptions for medicines to manage the effects of excess weight, averaging almost £340 a year for the most obese patients. This was followed by primary care services such as GP appointments, which could cost an average of £287 a year per patient.
There is a lot of evidence that obesity can increase the risk of a number of life-limiting conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and several forms of cancer.
According to Cancer Research UK, being overweight is a factor in one in 20 cases of cancer in the UK.
Heart failure was found to be the most expensive condition per patient when it comes to obesity, costing between £3,650 and £4,320 depending on weight class.
This was followed by kidney disease, which cost between £2,900 and almost £4,200, and cardiovascular disease, which cost between £2,700 and £3,500.
Other costly health problems associated with being overweight include damage to joints, such as the knees, and mental health problems, such as depression.
The costs include services such as emergency admissions, planned hospital procedures, regular health checks for diabetes and high blood pressure, prescriptions and GP appointments.
While costs of thousands of pounds may seem negligible compared to the millions that make up NHS budgets, the annual bill is thought to run into the billions if we scale this up to the quarter of the UK population being obese.
Unsurprisingly, costs for the most obese Britons are 64 percent higher than for overweight Britons.
But shockingly, the analysts, who published their findings in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, found that obese Britons account for 72 percent of all recorded healthcare costs.
According to the authors, this is because people in the most severe category are more likely to have multiple health problems related to obesity that drive up the bills.
They found that a third of the heaviest Britons had two or more obesity-related health conditions in one in three cases, compared with just a quarter of those who were solely overweight.
This resulted in obese patients with three or more obesity-related conditions having approximately twice the estimated health care costs as the patients in the study with only one such condition.
Hospital admissions for obese Britons account for the largest total expenditure, followed by prescriptions for medicines to manage the effects of excess weight.
This was followed by primary care services such as GP visits, which cost an average of £287 per year per patient.
Dr Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard, lead author of the analysis and head of the LCP analysis team, said: ‘Our research highlights that healthcare costs increase with BMI and are highest among people with severe obesity and those with common comorbidities such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and depression.’
But he added that these costs also demonstrate the benefits that preventing obesity can bring, both to patients and to taxpayers.
The study had a number of limitations. For example, it was an observational study, which meant that the participants’ health problems could not be directly linked to their obesity.
For example, while depression and obesity are linked, analysts could not determine whether a specific case of the mental illness was directly related to weight or some other factor.
This latest analysis follows another published late last year, which concluded that Britain’s rapidly growing obesity crisis is now costing the country almost £100 billion a year.
According to the BMI system, a score of 18.5 to 25 is healthy. A score of 25 to 29 is considered overweight, and 30-plus means a person is obese, the stage at which the risk of disease skyrockets.
This colossal total includes both the costs to the NHS of treating obesity and secondary costs such as lost income through sickness absence and premature deaths due to obesity.
Experts blame the country’s ever-expanding waistline on the simultaneous rise in processed, high-calorie unhealthy and ultra-processed foods and modern, sedentary lifestyles that keep people sitting at desks.
Two-thirds of all adults are now overweight, compared with just half in the mid-1990s. Of those, about a quarter are obese.
In terms of obesity, this equates to 16.8 million people, of which an estimated 8 million are women, 7.4 million are men, 760,000 are boys and 590,000 are girls.
Ministers had previously hoped that a raft of new obesity drugs, such as the Wegovy weight-loss vaccine, would turn the tide and get more Britons back to work.
The previous Conservative government previously floated plans to bring the groundbreaking drugs to market in a bid to reduce the country’s skyrocketing benefit costs.
The now-elected Labour government has previously stressed its plans to ban junk food advertising from 9pm onwards in a bid to combat childhood obesity.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson responded to the new analysis: ‘The link between the health of the nation and our economy is clear, which is why we are taking bold steps to rebuild our NHS and tackle the causes of disease.
‘We have tasked Lord Darzi to improve the health care status of the country.
‘His findings form the basis of our 10-year plan to radically reform the NHS and create a health service fit for the future that can tackle the obesity crisis head-on. We are shifting our focus from treatment to prevention to ease the pressure on the NHS and help people live well for longer.’
