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  • Posted By: Bullsfan @ 01/18/2008 4:44:45 PM

    excuses, excuses! so buy frozen veggies and fruit.... not expensive! neither are fresh bags of apples and bananas.
    and do some jumping jacks in your house. or do you not feel safe in there either?
    any other excuses you wanna throw out there? come on! I know you must have something better!

  • Posted By: health_guru1 @ 01/18/2008 3:48:58 PM

    You are right. Actually, that is exactly the point the author made in his famous article published on May 13, 2003, "National Medical Spending Attributable to Overweight and Obesity. How much, and Who's Paying." It seems to me that Dr. Finkelstein just reversed himself now, calling obesity a necessary result of prosperity.

    People in all kind of socio-economic classes can be fat, and they have all kind of excuses. No time. No money. Too much travel and eating out. No car to drive to good grocery stores. No side walks, etc. But the truth is unhealthy life style appeals to our nature, and the only way to like vegetables and exercise is by discipline. However, generally speaking, people of higher income are less likely to be fat, because they have good education, which requires disciplines and the ability to make good choices. They tend to have more resistence to immediate gratification.

    Dr. Finkelstein's idea that since we have technology to treat all the obesity-caused problem, we should just let everyone be happy and fat. I agree that people have the right to choose their own life style. But I certainly don't like to pay for their consequence. At a time when our health care is bankrupting our country, this book appeals to the lowest common denominator, and sends out the wrong message to a mass already too good at finding excuses.

  • Posted By: Cathexis @ 01/18/2008 2:03:43 PM

    Also, the speaker states: "In order to be a cost-saving program, employees would have to lose enough weight, keep it off long enough and stay with the company long enough so that the reduction in health-related costs would be borne by the company. In reality, people change jobs every five years on average, so these programs are unlikely to pay off for most firms. "

    Let me ask ... when a person leaves one company, where do they go?

    I'll go out on a limb and guess "to another company." With a closed system like that, if you could get consensus from all companies, then when they hired a person who left another company, they'd gain the benefits of the fitness program used.

    If they don't gain such a consensus, then companies with fitness programs merely subsidize those companies who hire thos eemployees, later.

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