This one’s from Clyde Soles, a veteran mountaineer, rock climber, writer and photographer. Soles has written a couple books for climbers, including this well-regarded title devoted to the subject of knots. He’s already had one provocative post pointing to evidence that the social costs of sloth are lower than the social costs of living a long and healthy life.
There is now scientific evidence that it’s less expensive to be unhealthy. Using data from the Netherlands (2003), researchers created a mathematical model to predict lifetime health costs of lean non-smokers, obese non-smokers, and lean smokers. It turns out that the “healthy-living” group has the highest cost on society. Why? Because we live longer. And that means more expensive health interventions in the long run. On the bright side, our health costs are the lowest until around age 56.
My mom, an expert on industrial health plans and employee wellness (she built a plan for a Dow 30 company), has told me time and again that research demonstrates this notion as false (specifically: staying fit prevents expensive health interventions, while sloth causes them), but I guess that means I need to talk to my mom more — I’m sure she’s up on this study.
Be that as it may, Clyde’s blog shows great promise. His pictures are pretty, too.
Interesting link. Thanks for passing it on.
I think you’re definitely better off to listen to you Mom on the health thing though. Wasn’t it a study from the Netherlands that recently identified moose flatulence as a major contributor of greenhouse gases? I sure got a laugh out of that. Sometimes these obscure studies simply aren’t worth serious consideration at best, and at worse, show us an example of wasteful abuse when publicly funded. I would seriously doubt that moose populations around the world have increased exponentially in the modern industrial age. Any fool can tell you this does not follow the trend, and therefore has nothing to do with so-called “greenhouse gasses”. But that’s just my interpretation.
Healthcare is a “Quality of Life” issue. The day that living better, and longer, is no longer the goal of healthcare; that is the day when society can be declared truly mad. Or perhaps a good sci-fi thriller is in the making here.
Hope you don’t mind the rant.
My mom told me that in England the health officials rationalized doing nothing about smoking because they figured if smokers die young it would save them a lot of old-age costs. What they found, over time, though was that non-smokers living to a ripe old age still cost less than the treatments for heart attack, stroke and cancer.
The study mentioned on that blog actually was looking more closely at obesity, which isn’t nearly as harmful to health as smoking. In the study’s defense, it was saying, in essence, that you won’t get the bang-for-your buck fighting obesity that you get fighting smoking. Which does make sense. I’ve seen tons of people who could stand to lose 30 pounds who are otherwise active, fit and healthy.