Study: Obesity carries high cost for women

WASHINGTON - Obesity puts a drag on the wallet as well as health, especially for women.

Doctors have long known that obese people's medical bills are higher, but that's only part of the real-life costs.

George Washington University researchers added in things like employee sick days, lost productivity, even the need for extra gasoline - and estimated the annual cost of being obese at $4,879 for a woman and $2,646 for a man.

That's far more than the cost of being merely overweight - put at $524 for women and $432 for men - concluded the report being released Tuesday. It analyzed previously published studies to come up with the totals.

Why the difference between the sexes? Studies suggest larger women earn less than thinner women, while wages don't differ when men pack on the pounds. That was a big surprise, said study co-author and health policy professor Christine Ferguson.

Researchers had expected everybody's wages to suffer with obesity, but "this indicates you're not that disadvantaged as a guy, from a wage perspective," said Ferguson.

Then consider that obesity is linked to earlier death. While that's not something usually considered a pocketbook issue, the report did average in the economic value of lost life. That brought women's annual obesity costs up to $8,365, and men's to $6,518.

The report was financed by a manufacturer of gastric banding, a type of obesity surgery.

The numbers are in line with other research and aren't surprising, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine and health economist at Duke University who wasn't involved in the new report.

Two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, and childhood obesity has tripled in the past three decades.

The report also included the quirky finding that nearly 1 billion additional gallons of gasoline are used every year because of increases in car passengers' weight since 1960.