Healthy lifestyles could squeeze fat from ballooning health costs
November 12, 2009
By SLINDILE KHANYILE
SOUTH Africa could potentially save R14.9 billion on health care costs if its population became healthier.
This is according to Discovery's Vitality white paper on healthy food, which said 6.8 percent of health care costs could be attributed to a rising prevalence of obesity and the consequent increased diabetes and cardiovascular disease risk.
The Department of Health said the country's total health care spend was R220bn when combining the public and private sectors, non-governmental organisations and the SA National Defence Force.
Craig Nossel, the head of wellness at Vitality, said yesterday the conclusions on the cost implications of having an unhealthy population were drawn by looking at trends such as the length of stay in hospitals for obese patients who were admitted and the medication they used because of their increased health risk.
According to the white paper, 29 percent of males and 56 percent of females aged above 15 are overweight.
In the obese category, the figures stand at 9 percent for males and 30 percent for females. As far as children are concerned, 17 percent are overweight and 4.2 percent are obese. At lease 37 percent of the deaths in the country are as a result of lifestyle diseases.
Nossel said three lifestyle behaviours - smoking, lack of exercise and poor diet - contributed highly to illnesses related to cancer, diabetes, heart disease and lung diseases.
"The challenge we have with healthy lifestyle is that the benefits are hidden, but the price is immediate," he said.
Marieke Loubser, Discovery's in-house dietician, said more alarming was the fact that children were becoming more obese. Children who are obese have a 70 percent chance of being overweight when they are adults.
Loubser said previously it was the high-income countries that had unhealthy people.
But the trend had changed as middle- and lower-income countries that were developing, such as South Africa and China, were experiencing a dramatic rise in people who were overweight and obese.
Loubser said: "Globalisation, including industrialisation, urbanisation and economic development, have le to profound global shifts in lifestyles linked with diet and physical activity.
"Poor dietary patterns and reduced energy expenditure have resulted in the deterioration in health, rapid spread of the obesity and chronic disease epidemic, all causes of illness and premature death."
People were eating more food, there was inappropriate advertising of food and the perception that eating healthily was expensive, said Loubser.
Nossel added that research showed that financial incentives to encourage people to be more healthy also helped.
Meanwhile, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals has launched a study to establish the effectiveness of the current cholesterol treatments and whether patients on lipid-lowering therapies do in fact reach their target low-density lipoprotein cholesterol goals.
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