Mr. Dimbleby really is wrong on this - obesity costs the nation near nothing

Yet another attempt from the founder of a fast food chain to tell us that - well, fast food actually - obesity is one of the grand public costs:

Britain’s weight problem is costing almost £100 billion a year and will scupper Rishi Sunak’s plans to get the sick back to work, analysis suggests.

This is not, in fact, true. It’s not true in the slightest. We assume that the idea is if the insistence is made forcefully and often enough then the political system can be stampeded into doing the wrong thing.

The cost to the NHS of obesity-related illness is now estimated at £19.2 billion a year, up from £10.8 billion, while the wider social costs include productivity losses of £15.1 billion, compared with £1.7 billion previously. The total cost of £98 billion, which includes the £63 billion cost of shorter, unhealthier lives, is equivalent to about 4 per cent of GDP.

As we’ve pointed out, repeatedly, obesity does not cost the NHS money. Yes, obviously, treating obesity related diseases has a cost. But we have a lifetime health care system. Therefore it is lifetime health care costs that matter. People dying young of exploding hearts save the system the money required for decades of hip replacements and Alzheimer’s care.

The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.

On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years and obese people lived about 80 years. Smokers and obese people tended to have more heart disease than the healthy people.

Cancer incidence, except for lung cancer, was the same in all three groups. Obese people had the most diabetes, and healthy people had the most strokes. Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on.

The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.

That NHS cost of £19.2 billion therefore does not exist. The correct number is actually negative, not positive. The £63 billion is a private, individual, cost not a societal nor public one.

We’d be willing to take a bet that those public costs, all in, are negative given that the NHS cost is negative.

All of which really does leave us with something of a puzzle. Why are people trying to influence public policy with numbers that are so obviously untrue?

We’ve even been quoted making this point:

Tim Worstall, of the Adam Smith Institute, has called warnings that obesity poses an NHS funding crisis “nonsense on stilts”. He wrote: “When you add in the costs of the state pensions that those who die young don’t get, smoking and gorging save the government vast sums of money. Having us all slim . . . would cost the NHS very much more money than the current level of topers, smokers and lardbuckets does.”

Disagreeing with us is obviously no sin but being at odds with reality is. So why are they doing this? What’s the plot here?