WASHINGTON — At the current rate of weight gain, by 2030, 57.2 percent of Texans will be obese. That could lead to 13 million more cases of chronic diseases like diabetes, heart failure and stroke, arthritis and cancer.
The projections by the Trust for America’s Health were released Tuesday in “F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2012.” The state’s current obesity rate is 30.4 percent, according to self-reported weight and height measurements gathered in surveys by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
(Because people tend to exaggerate their height and minimize their weight, the actual incidence is thought to be higher. Height and weight determine a person’s body mass index, or BMI; a BMI of 30 or more is considered obese.)
If Texans could curb their body mass index by 5 percent, they could save $54.2 billion in obesity-related health care costs between now and 2030, the study found.
Bad as the numbers may seem, they indicate Texas’ obesity epidemic is slowing. Obesity nearly tripled between 1990 and 2011, from 12.3 percent of the state’s population to 30.4 percent. The increase to 2030 is less than double the current level.
Several other states, led by Mississippi, will have greater than 60 percent obesity rates by 2030, the trust’s report found.
“Either we’ve figured out what things work or we’ve reached a kind of physiological plateau. No one’s ever thought 100 percent will become obese,” said Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, chief medical officer of BlueCross BlueShield of Texas and a board member of the Trust for America’s Health.
The obesity-related disease burden rises more rapidly. In 2010, 1.96 million Texans had type 2 diabetes. The study forecasts another 2.85 million cases by 2030, along with 5.7 million new cases of coronary heart disease, 5.7 million new hypertension cases, 3.8 million arthritis cases and 811,000 cancers.
Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust for America’s Health, said several measures are proving effective in slowing the increase in obesity and, in some instances, lowering it. Greater awareness of the health consequences spurs some people to act on their own to lose weight, for example.
But Levi argued it takes more than that.
“It’s one thing to say you have a responsibility to exercise and eat healthier,” he said. “But we need to provide safe places for people to walk, to exercise. We need to be teaching people how to prepare healthier foods and be giving them the choice to buy those foods, so people can indeed practice that personal responsibility.”
The study, available at healthyamericans.org, estimates obesity-related health care spending will total $51.7 billion in Texas in 2030. That measure includes both public and private expenditures. Texas Comptroller Susan Combs last year warned the legislature that Texas employers could be spending $32.5 billion by 2030 on their obese employees’ health care and absenteeism.
Combs said she did not have the data to verify the trust’s number, but “it’s nonetheless a terrifying number. Taking it on its face, it should shake everybody up.”
The areas of the country where obesity has fallen generally made long-term efforts focused on schools. Philadelphia, for example, reduced the rate of obesity among public-school children from 21.5 percent to 20.5 percent over a five-year period.
Several Dallas area organizations — including the Dallas Independent School District, United Way, the Cooper Institute and BlueCross BlueShield of Texas — are trying to develop a similar initiative under the working title of the Dallas County Children’s Health and Eradication of Childhood Obesity Initiative, Sanchez said.
Combs said her office would help provide data on potential hot spots for obesity in the state’s school districts at a website called reshapingtexas.org. She said the site should be operational in about six weeks.
Follow Jim Landers on Twitter at @landersjim.