22 percent of Idahoans obese

BOISE – Idaho and Washington aren’t the fattest states or the thinnest, according to a new national report, but more than one in five adults in both states are obese.

That’s part of a costly trend across the country that is driving up medical costs, the report said, and shows that obesity soon will pass tobacco use as the leading cause of preventable death. The report, compiled by the Trust for America’s Health, is titled, “F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America.”

Among the findings: 31 percent of American adults are obese, and obesity rates are on the rise. Forty-one states have rates higher than 20 percent, with Alabama the fattest state and Colorado the thinnest. Idaho’s and Washington’s obesity rates ranked 29th and 30th among the states at 21.8 percent and 21.7 percent respectively.

With obesity putting Americans at increased risk of more than 30 major diseases, including diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, stroke and cancer, the report said, “The nation’s younger generation may be the first in American history to live sicker and shorter lives than their parents.”

Idaho lawmakers, who have been debating the issue this year, passed legislation to start a weight-control pilot project for some Medicaid recipients if funding is available. The discussion came at the urging of Rep. Margaret Henbest, D-Boise, a nurse practitioner, who urged attention to the issue and encouraged lawmakers to diet during their three-month legislative session.

“This is a looming social problem from a health-care standpoint,” said Henbest, who also unsuccessfully promoted legislation to require health insurers to cover weight-reduction programs for the severely obese and to give insurance discounts to those who maintain a healthful weight.

“There are more people with diabetes, more people with heart disease. Many of them will be consuming public dollars,” Henbest said in support of her bills. “The more people we prevent from going down that road, the … less of a financial burden on the state.”

Just for Medicaid, the joint state-federal program that pays for health coverage for the poor and disabled, obesity-related costs are estimated at more than $21 billion a year nationwide.

Last year, the report showed, Idaho spent $69 million on obesity-related costs through its Medicaid program, while Washington spent $365 million.

State and federal responses to the problem have been fragmented and ineffective, the report said. It predicted that every state will fail to meet a federal goal of reducing the proportion of adults who are obese to 15 percent or lower by 2010.

Midwestern and Southern states had the highest rates of obesity, the report found.

Obesity rates doubled from 15 percent in 1980 to 31 percent in 2000, the report said, and if current trends hold, the national rate will rise to 39 percent by 2008.

People who are obese, or severely overweight, are at higher risk of premature death from all causes. Diabetes, a disease associated with obesity, has increased more than 50 percent in the United States in the past 10 years.

The report said that obesity rates are twice as high in low-income groups as in higher-income groups. Overall, it found that 34 percent of American women and 28 percent of American men are obese.

Eleven states, including Idaho and Washington, have passed so-called “cheeseburger laws” to prevent residents from suing restaurants, food manufacturers and marketers for making them fat. Both Idaho and Washington passed those laws this year.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have enacted junk-food or soda taxes, including Washington but not Idaho. Washington’s $1 per gallon tax on soda-pop syrup goes to fund violence prevention and drug enforcement.

The report, released Oct. 20, noted that Washington is among 13 states that have established state commissions on obesity or nutrition in the past two years. Washington state legislation enacted this year created a school nutrition advisory committee.

The Trust for America’s Health is a Washington, D.C., advocacy group that seeks to make disease prevention a national priority. The report, its first on state obesity trends, is available on the Internet at http://healthyamericans.org/reports/obesity/ObesityReport.pdf.