This article is about one of the main reasons healthcare costs are soaring in the United States. It’s not Obamacare.
Obesity and the diseases it causes are a major contribution to the cost of health insurance and out-of-pocket healthcare costs today.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has argued recently that hyperpalatable, ultra‑processed foods are “poisoning” Americans and driving obesity and chronic disease. He has begun pushing policy and guideline changes to reduce them.
However, Kennedy has proved himself to be such a dangerous nut case on health issues overall that any issue he touches can become tainted. That’s a shame for Americans because with ultra-processed foods, he has clearly identified a real problem.
His recommendations mix solid, evidence‑based elements (less ultra‑processed food, less added sugar, more whole foods) with what could politely be called highly contested claims, including emphasis on red meat and full‑fat dairy and blaming seed oils. His notions fall far short of sufficiency as a public‑health strategy.
This problem was much smaller in the 1960s and 1970s.
Table: Obesity Prevalence in U.S. Adults
1960–1962 13.3%
1971–1974 14.7%
1976–1980 15.2%
1988–1994 22.9%
1999–2000 30.5%
2005–2006 35.1%
2009–2010 35.7%
2015–2016 39.6%
2017–2018 42.4%
March 2020 41.9%
2021-2023 40.3%
This is obviously a monstrous increase.
Americans have the highest obesity rates of all OECD* countries. The average obesity rate across all 31 other OECD* countries was 17% as of 2022.
* OECD countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic (Czechia), Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, South Korea (Republic of Korea), Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Türkiye, United Kingdom, United States.
Obesity is only one of the reasons, but a big one, for this shocking statistic:
The average total per capita healthcare expenditure—including insurance, government spending, and out-of-pocket costs—for all OECD countries other than the U.S. was $7,371 in 2024, according to the Peterson Foundation.
In the U.S., according to Health Systems Tracker using DMS and CDC data, it was $14,570 – twice as high. And projections indicate that per capita U.S. healthcare costs will rise to approximately $15,600–$15,900 in 2026.
How Much Is Obesity At Fault For Healthcare Costs?
If untreated, obese people contract high rates of diabetes, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, hypertension, stroke, sleep apnea, asthma, gout, osteoarthritis*, fatty liver disease, gall bladder disease, chronic kidney disease, at least 13 different cancers, treatable depression, and more.
*People with severe obesity (body mass index over 40) are 30 times as likely to need total knee replacement and nine times as likely to need total hip replacement as someone who is not obese. A knee replacement costs an average of $29,000 to $32,000, and a hip replacement $39,000 to $53,000.
The new GLP-1 weight-loss/diabetes drugs have been accelerating the rise in healthcare costs because their prices have been so high. The annual U.S. cost per patient taking GLP-1 drugs is currently in the $6,400 to over $8,000 per year range.
According to JamaNetwork, the total real-world costs of these new drugs, population-wide, were higher in 2025 than the total costs of treating the diseases they address.
About 40% of people on employer health insurance are eligible for these diabetes and obesity drugs, so the potential national cost is gigantic. Some employer plans were projecting that GLP-1s will account for 9% of their entire payments to providers in 2026.
A web search on February 28, 2026, turned up the conclusion that despite discounts, private insurance plans are spending more on GLP-1 drugs than in 2024 and 2025.
In short, they still cost more in healthcare spending than they save.
On Nov. 6, 2025, President Trump announced that he’d made a deal with two of the GLP-1 manufacturers, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, to substantially reduce prices for Wegovy, Ozempic, Zepbound, and Mounjaro.
The deal is complicated, but experts who commented in news reports seemed to agree that the deal lowers GLP-1 costs enough that the equation – costs of the drugs vs. costs of treating the diseases they fight – might shift in favor of paying for the drugs.
If that were the entire equation, great! Right?
Well, it obviously isn’t.
Here are the more important inputs to the real equation: fill supermarket shelves with junk food designed to induce cravings to eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, and thereby make a giant swath of the population vulnerable to the diseases above. Then sell this swath a $250-to-$500-per-month drug to treat the consequences of “eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.”
This is insanity. Highly profitable insanity.
Americans are not voluntarily becoming an obese nation. Many people are being addicted to overeating. Not “addicted” in the commonly used colloquial sense. Literally addicted in a medical sense.
A large body of scientific evidence has proven that designing the taste of processed foods in the U.S. by engineering so-called “hyper-palatable” foods is a significant factor in the mass consumption of unhealthy foods. (See “Factors affecting food addiction: emotional eating, palatable eating motivations, and BMI,“ published in Food Science and Nutrition, July 28, 2024.)
Direct addiction to hyper-palatable foods takes mere weeks to months, and about 14% to 15% of Americans are susceptible, studies say. Even if not medically addicted, many people have dependencies that are variously called emotional eating, emotional dependence on food, stress eating, comfort eating, or disordered eating.
A large number of other factors contribute to obesity. A big one is habitual overeating without being addicted per se. This Mayo Clinic article discusses causes: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/obesity/symptoms-causes/syc-20375742
Sedentary behavior is another rising, major cause. It is said that if you teach a man to fish, he’ll have fish to eat for life. By the same token, give your kids unlimited access to games on cell phones and buy them supermarket snacks, and there’s a good chance that they’ll eat fat-filled, high-salt, and sugary foods for life.
Evidence Linking Flavor Engineering to Eating Habits
Flavor perception and engineered taste in processed foods directly impact food selection, dietary behavior, brain responses, and nutritional outcomes. The addition of artificial flavors and the deliberate balancing of sugar, fat, and salt in processed foods create overconsumption and raise the risk of diet-related diseases.
Research quantifies the rise in the availability of hyper-palatable foods (HPF)—products specifically designed with combinations of sugar, fat, sodium, and refined carbohydrates to boost reward and overeating—across the U.S. food system.
From 1988 to 2018, the prevalence of so-called “hyper-palatable” foods increased by 20%, with constant reformulations of them to increase the desire to keep eating them.
Randomized controlled trials have shown that intentionally designed “hyper-palatable” foods overstimulate taste buds. They make foods more emotionally rewarding and encourage greater consumption than would occur naturally. They override typical satiety cues. People have trouble stopping eating due to their engineered flavor profiles.
They weaken the link between taste and actual nutrient content.
Key Sources (with direct links)
National Library of Medicine—Comprehensive review of how flavors influence food choices, nutrition, and public health: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12082435/
Study on the increase of hyper-palatable foods in the U.S. food system: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9672140/
Frontiers in Nutrition—Impact of processing and engineered taste on energy intake and body weight: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8754564/
University of Kansas—Research on hyper-palatable foods and their impact on eating behaviors: https://addiction.ku.edu/news/article/2023/01/30/research-shows-impact-hyper-palatable-foods-across-four-diets
University of Michigan—How food corporations engineer and manipulate taste to drive consumption: https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/faculty-news/how-food-corporations-manipulate-you-into-eating-more-junk-food.html
These findings are consistent across multiple independent studies and reviews, confirming that engineered taste is a major driver of unhealthy eating patterns and associated health problems in America.
Why Is Nothing Done About This?
If food is being deliberately tampered with to make Americans hyperfat, why hasn’t an effort to curb this hyper-expensive trend gone into hyper-gear at the national level?
The usual answer: hyper-powerful political influence money.
Food and beverage PACs and food processing and sale PACs gave $6,152,878 to candidates for national office in 2023-2024, according to OpenSecrets. Of that total, 64% went to Republicans and 36% to Democrats.
According to OpenSecrets data, $875,000 to $900,000 of that money went to Donald Trump and his campaign. On the Democratic side, very little went to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris; most of the money to Democrats went to candidates for Congress.
These politicians know which side their bread is buttered on. And where the jelly comes from.
What, Then, Must We Do?
The obvious first targets are the ultraprocessed food industry and treating hyperpalatable “food” design as what it is: poisoning the population in a manner little different from the way Big Tobacco designed cigarettes with higher nicotine levels to increase dependency and addition.
That sort of recognition by government can only happen with a major change in leadership at the federal and state levels. We’re a long way from there, but the 2026 and 2028 elections might make it possible to legislate change.
On the Democratic side, a nuanced shift in attitudes and language is needed. Most Democrats oppose fat-shaming. In fact, numerous studies show that fat-shaming only contributes to obesity by emotionally driving some obese people toward more disordered eating.
However, there is an emerging concern that if the social message drifts from “you deserve dignity and good care at any size” into “weight is irrelevant to health,” many people will underestimate the real health risks of obesity and be less inclined to change behavior.
Again, however, the long and largely successful fight to reduce smoking provides a model: Big Tobacco was rightfully cast in public messaging as the Enemy of the People when the calculated efforts to increase desire to smoke by raising nicotine content and to make smoking attractive to young tweens with targeted advertising were exposed.
The same sort of equally calculated messaging that demonizes the designers of hyperpalatable, toxic foods is in order — and in fact, overdue. Also, in a very strong way, the political path is easier. The objective in targeting smoking was cessation. With food, it’s not stopping sales. It is merely that of putting an end to hyperpalatable design and reducing fats, sugars, and salt. (Salt is a palatability trigger with its own serious health effects when overdosed, and serious overdosing of salt, as with sugar and fat, is the norm in American diets — see ”Salty foods are making people sick − in part by poisoning their microbiomes,” The Conversation, March 12, 2024).
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