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Comment by terrellm | Hacker News Reader

Good point...poor lifestyle drives healthcare costs up. It would be interesting to see fast food spending or avg calories/day on top of this chart.

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Couldn't agree more and it's a point a lot of people are hush-huse about because it's easier to point the finger at the system than poor personal habits.

just a small sample... http://grab.by/1v6n

Here's the thing, I'm a Canadian who's living in the USA. Canada has much lower health care costs - but our dietary patterns are much the same. In fact, I really have not changed my feeding habits at all since coming to the USA.

Yes, unhealthy dietary choices weighs the system down - but it weighs all systems down, and to say it accounts for the majority of the discrepancy is IMHO missing the gorilla in the room, which is that the US health care system is unbelievably broken.

Addendum: There is one thing where the US is very different from Canada. You guys eat the same stuff we do... but you eat much more of it. I'm pretty convinced that the average American can eat half, if not one quarter what they currently do and be just fine. Serving sizes in the US are so big that nowadays I often pack up lunch leftovers and have more than enough for dinner.

Canadian diet patterns are significantly different from those in the US. As of 2004, Canada had an obesity rate of 23.1%. The corresponding rate in the US (circa 2005) was 34%.

The big difference here is probably racial. Table 3 of my first link suggests white Canadians are only a little thinner than white Americans. But blacks, particularly black women, are considerably fatter than average. They make up about 12% of the US and 2% of Canada.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-620-m/2005001/article/adults...

That wouldn't account for it. Even if every single black person was obese and every single white person was not, a 2%->12% discrepancy in black population could only account for a 10% swing in obesity rates. The rates you cite differ by more than that.

I think that potatolicious's addendum hit the nail on the head though: Americans eat too much food. When I cook for myself or eat at Google, my portion size is about 2/3 the typical restaurant portion. Doggy-bags have always been normal when my family ate out - it's not unusual for a restaurant meal to generate at least another couple lunches and sometimes another dinner. We're not fat. I suspect that a lot of Americans don't realize that restaurant portions are sized to accommodate the biggest conceivable person eating there (serving too little food is far worse than serving too much), and that the typical person shouldn't be eating anywhere near that much.

True, blacks alone would not account for the disparity. As I mentioned, white Canadians are less obese as well.

But the disparity is much larger for blacks. I mentioned blacks mainly because I could quickly find statistics for them.

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