Health and obesity — the new class divide

Recently, some very close French colleagues of mine came to Florida to attend the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals conference. Orlando is interesting because ALL of America comes to see Disney. Naturally, being French, they marveled at the amount of obesity in such a wide cross-section of Americans. But one of my colleagues made an especially tranchant observation — obesity, like smoking, is becoming a real signifier of class in the country.

“You know, it’s obvious what class you belong to if you are obese. Anybody over 50 who looks to be in shape is almost always in some form of management, no matter what kind of clothing they are wearing.”

As an American, this strikes me as true. So in the future, a membership to the country club and an extensive collection of vintage white burgundies won’t be as much an indicator of the upper class as low body fat and lack of chronic medical illnesses.

To put a point on this, yesterday John Hopkins published a landmark national study on obesity in JAMA. The statistics shows conclusively that teens living at or below the poverty line are considerably more likely to be obese and then to develop chronic medical illnesses, often by their late 20s.

There are two crushing implications here:

First, obesity will become even more of a class stigma. After all, future generations will reason, only poor people get fat. And if you are overweight, it will associate you with the less educated.

Second, and more importantly, the underclass is most likely to receive Medicaid and other publicly assisted healthcare, and they are going to be developing diabetes and heart disease long before previous generations. We have enough technology to keep these people from dying, but the impact on healthcare budgets will be crippling.

In short, the lifestyle of our poorest citizens is almost guaranteed to cause a fiscal crisis in the future.

Labels: Healthcare