[elishah]

> Metabolic health is responsible for at least 3/5 of healthcare costs.

I would love to see a source for that, as it is strongly at odds with all data that I've ever seen. For example:

"Medical cost of overweight and obesity combined is approximately 5.0% to 10% of US healthcare spending." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-789X....

"Costs attributable to overweight and obesity in Canada were $6.0 billion in 2006, with 66% attributable to obesity. This corresponds to 4.1% of the total health expenditures in Canada in 2006. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-789X....

"Costs attributable to obesity totaled US$ 269.6 million (1.86% of all expenditures on medium- and high-complexity health care)." https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

This is a notoriously difficult thing to estimate, and highly influenced by exact definitions of any given study, so some variance is to be expected. But going from around 6% to >60% seems like quite a jump.

[worik]

We can cherry pick until we go green...

Here is the top result for me at: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Metabolic+health+share+of+healthca...

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/poor-diet...

Starts with:

> Unhealthy diets account for almost 20% of U.S. health care costs from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, according to a new study.

Please help yourself to cherries

[elishah]

Sure, but even that cherry looks a whole lot more like the rest of the numbers I've found than the one grandparent comment offered.

The study you cite only examines the costs for cardiometabolic disease, not all healthcare costs. And then says that suboptimal diet is responsible for 18% of that specific category.

"18% of the costs of the one category most closely linked" and "5-10% of all healthcare costs" seem like plausibly compatible measures. Whereas the grandparent comment's claim remains out of synch with those by an order of magnitude.

[verteu]

Yes, 20% of the cost "from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes", which is significantly less than 20% of the total. (The press release has less ambiguous wording: "18 percent of all heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes costs in the country").

[poorbutdebtfree]

Does this data even include the costs associated with private EMS transporting tens of thousands of type 2 diabetes/dialysis patients every morning from their private residences and skilled nursing facilities to chop shops like Davita?