Obese Workers Cost U.S. $73 Billion a Year: Cause for More African American Job Discrimination?

A study just came out with the startling news that obese workers cost the United States $73 billion a year. As the article on Yahoo News puts it: "The dollar sum lost is the 'equivalent of hiring 1.8 million workers a year at 42,000 dollars each.'"

That's almost two million more people who could have jobs with the savings potentially created by somehow eliminating obesity. And how were these savings estimated? The major culprit in creating the wasted sums was determined to be "presenteeism," which is defined as poor job performance caused by various factors, such as being obese. The suggestion the study presents is that obesity is a major cause of presenteeism in the work place. Yahoo News has more:

[R]esearchers tallied medical expenditures, presenteeism and absence from work to put a dollar figure on the per capita cost of obesity among full-time US workers.

Taking all three categories into account, the researchers calculated that the per capita cost of obesity was as high as 16,900 dollars a year for women who were roughly 100 pounds (45 kilograms) overweight, or had a body mass index over 40. For obese men with a BMI over 40, the cost was 15,500 dollars a year.

By comparison, the cost of all three for normal-weight women and men was around 10,000 dollars a year.

Regardless of weight, presenteeism was found to be "the largest single driver of the costs," said the study, which was published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Please read the rest at the Yahoo News Web site.

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Celebrity Diet Secrets

5 Factor Diet: This diet plan, which has celebrity followers like Kanye West and Alicia Keys singing it's praises, requires followers to eat five small, healthy meals a day instead of the typical three.

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The Cookie Diet: Celebs like Jennifer Hudson have been linked to the new cookie diet, which uses specially made fiber-rich cookies to stave off hunger during the day -- at night you're allowed a sensible dinner.

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What do these findings mean for African Americans in terms of our struggle with double digit unemployment rates?

In a recent speech about the growing epidemic of obesity in this country, First Lady Michelle Obama called "obesity, especially in the black community, the 'slow, quiet, everyday threat that doesn't always appear to warrant the headline urgency of some of the other issues that we face.'" And Mrs. Obama is not just using strong language to be dramatic. A recent essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association concurs that there is a "greater risk for severe obesity in African American persons." An article from the New York Times earlier this year states that African Americans have the highest obesity rates of any other ethnic group, at 37% for men and 50% for women.

If you combine that fact, with the fact that we already suffer from higher rates of discrimination in hiring practices, a troubling image of our collective future emerges.

Related:
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As ruthlessly profit-driven as companies have become during this recession, employers are constantly looking for ways to cut costs, including laying off employees. The people who have been laid off already might be workers who were outmoded, or perhaps the least productive -- but statistics like these about the costs of obesity might make employers start to think preemptively. To save future dollars, companies might start to discriminate against obese workers in hiring, and put them up first in consideration for firing. If African American obesity rates are at 37% for men and 50% for women -- and by all accounts getting worse -- this places our already challenged group in a very precarious position.

We will then have two strikes against us when it comes to getting hired or possibly laid off. One being black, the other a higher chance that we are obese. This makes obesity, something we can control, a critical issue related to our economic empowerment.

Being severely overweight of course has critical health implications. But if black people cannot get and keep jobs because of obesity in addition to other issues, we could see our community faring even worse as the recession continues. This means that programs and initiatives that seek to reduce obesity in communities might help us to get and keep jobs in the future. If we don't work to control an issue that we can directly impact like obesity, we will only make things harder for ourselves in the long run.

Questions:

-Do you agree that obese workers "cost" the United States billions of dollars a year? What in your personal experience supports or refutes this study?

-Should the government take more responsibility for curbing obesity? If not, who should?

-Is it fair for employers to discriminate against the obese, if it obesity does in fact have such high costs?

-What should the black community do about these findings, as obesity affects our community more than any other at the present time?