Canada’s health-care system faces mounting economic pressure that threatens its sustainability, partly driven by a crisis hiding in plain sight. We spend billions treating obesity’s complications while restricting access to treatments that could solve the problem. The uncomfortable truth demands acknowledgment. We can treat obesity effectively now or watch as our system crumbles under unsustainable costs.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the deadly cost of inaction on obesity. Countries where more than half the population was overweight had death rates nearly 10 times higher than those with lower obesity prevalence. Of 900,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations in the United States, about 30 per cent were directly attributable to obesity. Effective treatment could have saved countless lives.

Yet th

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