Monday, February 12, 2007

The taxing burden of obesity

Ann Cooper wrote a paper for the Food and Society Policy Fellows with this quote (and source):

"It costs approximately $6,000 to feed a child lunch during the entire tenure of their K-12 education, and it costs our health care system and our taxes approximately $175,000 per adult, for illnesses related to poor childhood nutrition."

Sources: “National School Lunch Program,” USDA: Child Nutrition Webpage: FNS Online, February 2002; “Nutrition and the Health of Young People: Fact Sheet,” USDA:CDC, June 1997.

4 comments:

Noumenon said...

Doing some Google searches and using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I think I've located the Nutrition and the Health of Young People
Fact Sheet
. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide any supporting evidence for the $175,000 figure, which is what I was trying to check out.

Tim Crosby said...

I have hounded for verification for this as well. The CDC article "Nutrition and the Health of Young People: Fact Sheet,” USDA:CDC, June 1997 remains elusive. I have found other fact sheets, but not this one.

Still looking for the 97 sheet.Thanks for the help.

Tim

Noumenon said...

Well, the link I provided is the version that the Internet Archive archived on Jan 28, 1999. The original URL was http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dash/nutfact.htm , which I got from Googling people talking about the fact sheet. The text of the page claims it's the 1997 CDC version. So I think I found it, the only caveat being that it doesn't support the claim it was cited to support. But that wouldn't be the first time that's happened on the Internet, which is why I went looking for the cited source to begin with.

Tim Crosby said...

I know that link/site. The tough part is that it does not say June 1997.

The other source Ann Cooper mentions is “National School Lunch Program,” USDA: Child Nutrition Webpage: FNS Online, February 2002. I am going to dive deep here and see if I can drum out the dollar figures here. initial queries of the www.fns.usda.gov website are coming up empty, but I am going to keep trying.
Thanks,
Tim