Obesity Leads To More Doctor Visits Than Smoking

A lotta good that does.

Statistics show that today, almost one in four Canadians is obese. A deadly trend that has been on the rise for the last thirty years, obesity is associated with diabetes, heart disease and cancer. But is the obesity epidemic putting more pressure on an already strained Canadian health care system?

James McIntosh, a professor in the Department of Economics at Concordia University, is the first to look at the impact of obesity on the number of doctor visits nation-wide.

According to his research, obese individuals visit the doctor more frequently than regular smokers who are at a healthy weight.

"The fact that obesity is more serious than smoking helps people understand the gravity of the problem because they already have some kind of intuitive understanding of how bad smoking is," says McIntosh.

To calculate what would happen if obesity were eliminated entirely, McIntosh used a model created from data that included information from over 60,000 Canadians from the 2010 Community Health Survey. He found that if obesity were not a factor, doctor visits would decrease by 10 percent.

Doctor visits may further decrease when one takes into account the many visits to the doctor for problems related to type 2 diabetes, a disease is related directly to obesity.

It's also possible that obesity is the cause of even more doctor visits than estimated by McIntosh's model because the national survey does not include information about weight history. Someone who has developed obesity recently may not yet be experiencing the full effect of complications such as diabetes and the accompanying need for more medical care.

If they really wanted to cut down on visits to the doc, all that is needed is for the fatso to pay for it.

Watch the number of visits plummet.