Regular sized wheelchairs (L) pictured with an oversize in children and maternity of women at the University of Alabama Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama Reuters

American Hospital ripped out wall-mounted toilet and replace it with the floor models to better support obese patients. Federal Transit Administration bus want to be tested for heavy riders on the impact of the wheel and braking. Burning car almost a year than a billion gallons of gasoline if the passengers weighed what they did in the 1960s.

The nation’s rising obesity rates have been well-chronicled. But businesses, Governments and individuals are only now coming to grips with the cost of the extra pounds, many of which are larger than believed only a few years ago: additional medical expenses due to obesity doubles the previously expected and exceeds even the people smoke cigarettes, a new study shows.

Many of these costs has a dollar sign ahead of them, such as health insurance premiums higher everyone pay to cover the additional costs of medical. Other changes, it is often cost-neutral, come to the neighborhood was built in the form of wider seats in public places of sports stadium bus stops.

Staggering economic costs of obesity, often borne by non-obese, could become epidemic former asap. Only when scientists found that nonsmokers to develop lung cancer and other diseases, from exhale smoke filled air do policymakers get serious about fighting habits, especially by establishing the zone. Smoking costs Medicaid also added to spur action. Now, as economists put a price tag on the body mass index of sky-high (BMIs), policy makers as well as the private sector is mobilized to find a solution to the obesity epidemic.