Any lingering doubts that America's cavalier attitude toward lousy food and obesity is draining the nation's health and economic vitality should have been laid to rest a couple weeks ago. Two important studies were released that quantified just how much our inability to resist fast food is costing us.

 

In Health Affairs, the premier journal of health care market dynamics, economics and policy, Professor Ken Thorpe and colleagues from Emory reported on a study comparing incidences of chronic disease in the US and in 10 European countries. They found strong evidence that Americans have much higher levels of lifestyle-related chronic disease than do Europeans - in other words, we're sicker - that American medicine tends to identify and treat disease more aggressively than does European medicine, and that our more excessive lifestyles and aggressive treatment patterns undoubtedly contribute significantly to our much higher per capita health care spending, which can be twice what Europeans pay.

 

The second study, from the Milken Institute, is called An UnHealthy America: The Economic Burden of Chronic Disease, and it provides a calculation of the direct and indirect costs of seven of the most common and costly chronic diseases. The findings are staggering. America currently spends more than a trillion dollars - more than $200 billion for direct care and more than $900 million in lost productivity - on avoidable conditions. Unless we do something differently, that number is expected to rise to $6 trillion by the middle of the century, crippling the nation's health status and economy.

 

 

While Dr. Thorpe and his colleagues present compelling evidence that, at least in part, Americans pay so much more for our health care than Europeans because we take such poor care of ourselves. And once we get disease, we may not manage the care processes as well as Europeans do.

 

But those points aside, in a sense there  is little new in these studies. Instead, they confirm what we already all know, and in a damning way. As a people, we appear to be nearly unconscious of the impacts of our habits on our health or prosperity.

 

America's addiction to fast, prepared and junk foods is, of course, continually stoked by the propaganda machines of  the processed food industry, which spend huge sums on both marketing and lobbying.

 

America's health care crisis has two enormous wings. On one side, a fee-for-service reimbursement system and a lack of transparency cultivate an opportunistic culture that generates excessive care and cost throughout the health care supply chain, the care delivery system and the financing sector. On the other, a food industry preys on our children without regard for the consequences to them or the welfare of the nation.

 

Neither of these problems can be resolved until the nation's most powerful individuals - the business leaders who run firms outside of health care and the food industries - unite to demand greater adherence to behaviors that work for, rather than against America's future.