I’m surprised that this hasn’t been posted already, but there is an article floating around the AP circuits about a Dutch study with some interesting results. The point of the study is that because people die from diseases related to obesity and smoking, it ends up saving the medical system money. These people tend to drop dead suddenly or suffer from quickly progressing diseases whereas healthy people live longer and tend to die from diseases that progress more slowly. It makes sense, but I was a bit surprised to see that the healthy people in the Netherlands suffer from the most strokes. I guess other things are likely to happen to obese people and smokers before a stroke hits them. This is similar to a study that I read about a few years ago that was done in the Czech Republic. It basically said that premature deaths caused from smoking saved the country something like $165mil/year.
What are your thoughts on this?
