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With governments around the world looking everywhere and anywhere for places to cut costs, a huge target is often a nation’s healthcare system. Two healthcare areas that excessively drain health budgets budgets are Obesity & Smoking.
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Dez: Hello everyone, this is Dez Morgan here reporting in from Abu Dhabi in the UAE.
Skip: And I am Skip Montreux coming to you from Tokyo, Japan.
Dez: Welcome to an all new episode of Down to Business English.
Skip: So Dez, tell me, how is the healthy living going now that you have given up smoking?
Dez: Pretty good actually. I feel a lot better and I’m exercising more now that I don’t get out of breath all of the time. So on the whole life is certainly better.
Skip: Other people I know who have stopped smoking say that when they gave up, they started to eat more, especially chocolate and sweets.
Dez: Well yes that’s certainly happened to me too and it’s difficult to keep the weight off.
Skip: Well being a little overweight is probably better than smoking, isn’t it?
Dez: Well, surprisingly in overall terms, obesity is a much greater problem than smoking. The campaigns to stop smoking have been pretty successful over the last few years so in overall cost terms, in the UK, obesity costs the health service at least double what smoking does.
Skip: Wow! And that is our story today, so let’s do it. Let’s get D2B…. Down to Business with the real health costs of obesity and smoking and how they are a major drag on the economies of the developed world.
