Obesity
(asked on 14th March 2018) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the cost of obesity to the (a) NHS and (b) the social care sector in each of the last five years.
The economic burden of ill health due to diet, physical inactivity, smoking, alcohol and obesity in the UK: an update to 2006-07 NHS costs estimated that overweight and obesity cost the National Health Service in the United Kingdom £5.1 billion per year. This figure was uplifted to £6.1 billion in 2014/15 to take account of inflation.
The Foresight team published Tackling Obesities: Future Choices in 2007. This estimated the annual costs of overweight and obesity to society and the economy as £27 billion in 2015, based on obesity prevalence at the time. In 2014 the McKinsey Global Institute estimated the cost of obesity to the UK economy as £46 billion per year.
No further estimates of the costs of obesity have been made centrally.
Copies of The economic burden of ill health due to diet, physical inactivity, smoking, alcohol and obesity in the UK: an update to 2006-07 NHS costs; Tackling Obesities: Future Choices; and the McKinsey Global Institute’s report Overcoming obesity: An initial economic analysis are available at:
https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/33/4/527/1568587