In exchange for lower health premiums under Obamacare, experts say shoppers could pay higher prices on everything from printer paper to French fries.

Complying with the Affordable Care Act will cost as much as $420 million annually, McDonald’s CFO Peter Bensen said during a conference call Monday, according to CFO Journal. And when the new law goes fully into effect in 2014, it’s possible menu prices will be raised to cover the health costs.

Analysts say businesses with a large number of hourly wage workers, who traditionally had minimal or no health insurance—from fast food joints to retailers—may have to adopt a similar strategy. “I would expect prices at McDonald’s (MCD) to go up,” says Les Funtleyder, who manages a health care fund at Poliwogg, a hedge and venture capital firm. (A McDonald’s spokeswoman says the company doesn’t set prices for its franchised restaurants, which represent about 90% of its 14,000 U.S. outposts, and that “it would be premature and inaccurate to speculate on raising menu prices to offset these costs.”)

But experts say the price hikes could extend beyond chicken McNuggets. Some analysts believe companies may use health care as an excuse to raise prices, even if the added costs don’t warrant the increase. Peter Saleh, a restaurant analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, expects sit-down diners at restaurants like The Olive Garden, owned by Darden Restaurants (DRI), and The Cheesecake Factory (CAKE), which own a greater proportion of their locations than some fast food chains, to eventually pay at least 2% more to eat there. But Saleh says it’s too soon to know how the companies will cope with the new mandates: “A lot of them at this point aren’t willing to give us estimates about it.”

Businesses bracing for additional costs as a result of the health-care law tend to be those that previously provided barebones coverage, or so-called “mini-med plans,” which charge low premiums but provide limited benefits, according to a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. These companies represent less than 2% of the market, according to the spokesman. Starbucks, on the other hand, doesn’t anticipate additional expenses to insure its employees because its benefits already meet the standards of the Affordable Care Act, CFO Journal reports.

Will Obamacare Raise the Price of a Big Mac? – Real-Time Advice – SmartMoney

In a new report titled “Globesity — The Global Fight Against Obesity,” Merrill Lynch proposes a basket of 50 stocks it sees making gains from the fight against global obesity. The report identifies specific segments of four key sectors for investors to watch:

Pharmaceuticals and health care: companies taking on obesity-related medical conditions; companies that specialize in equipment for overweight patients, like bigger beds and wider ambulance doors.

Food: companies trying to access the $663 billion health-and-wellness market.

Commercial weight loss, diet management, and nutrition: companies trying to access this already $4 billion U.S. market and the growing global one.

Sports apparel and equipment: companies in tune with the belief that governments and the general public will become increasingly aware that exercise is of paramount importance in taking weight off and keeping it off, and as such will do well selling the necessary equipment.

Is ‘Globesity’ the Next Big Thing in Investing? – DailyFinance

Americans who are employed full time or voluntarily part time enjoy better physical health than those who are unemployed or have less work than they would like. However, those who are not in the workforce at all report the worst health. Employed Americans have a score of 81.4 on the Gallup-Healthways Physical Health Index, compared with 76.1 among those who are employed part time but seeking full-time work, 75.2 for those who are unemployed, and 68.8 for those who are not in the workforce.

Employed Americans in every age group report better physical health than do those who are underemployed or those who are not in the workforce, particularly among those between the ages of 30 and 64.

Those not in the workforce — meaning they are not employed and not actively seeking employment — have the worst physical health overall. While this is partly due to most of these individuals being of retirement age, even among seniors, those who are working report better health than their counterparts who are not. This pattern holds among those between the ages of 30 and 44 as well as those aged 45 to 64, and may be, in part, due to those who have lost or cannot hold work due to poor health and have now stopped seeking employment.

Employed Americans in Better Health Than the Unemployed

Blacks are among the most likely in the United States to be very obese, with about 9% falling into obese class II and 6% obese class III — the highest Body Mass Index (BMI) categories. Asians are by far the least likely to fall into these two classes of obesity. Hispanics are on par with whites for each obesity class.

Relationships by race and the others presented in this article hold true even when controlling for age, ethnicity, race, marital status, gender, employment, income, education, and region.

In U.S., Blacks Most Likely to Be Very Obese, Asians Least

It’s July, and for many of us, that brings back fond childhood memories of family vacations, summer camp or long, happy days spent playing with friends. But this quaint notion of summers as a kids’ paradise is dangerously misleading, evidence from social research suggests.

After spending the summer away from the classroom, children return to school one month or more, on average, behind where they were when the previous year ended. Kids also tend to put on weight in the summer two to three times faster than they do during the school year.

To put it unkindly, the average child becomes dumber and fatter during the vacation. And although there’s no need to declare war on summer, there’s plenty we could do to combat the seasonal learning loss and weight gain.

Consider, first, the evidence for the summer fade effect. Taken together, a variety of studies indicate that students’ academic skills atrophy during the summer months by an amount equivalent to what they learn in a third of a school year, according to a review by Harris Cooper, a professor of education at Duke University, and several co-authors.

This deterioration, furthermore, varies substantially by income and race, and its impact persists even past childhood. Barbara Heyns, a sociologist at New York University who studied Atlanta schoolchildren in the late 1970s, found that although academic gains during the school year were not substantially correlated with income, summer decline was.

Subsequent studies have replicated the finding. Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle and Linda Olson of Johns Hopkins University, for example, found that the summer fade can largely explain why the gap in skills between children on either side of the socioeconomic divide widens as students progress through elementary school. Children from all backgrounds learn at similar rates during the school year, but each summer students of high socioeconomic status continue to learn while those of low socioeconomic status fall behind.

How Summer Is Making U.S. Kids Dumber and Fatter – Bloomberg

Most Americans say obesity is an “extremely” or “very serious” problem to society, the 81% who do so is up significantly from 69% in 2005, the last time Gallup asked this question. Americans now see obesity as a more serious societal issue than cigarettes — a change from the past.

Gallup has asked Americans how serious a problem obesity, cigarettes, and alcohol are to society three times since 2003. The combined percentage rating obesity as extremely or very serious has increased with each survey. While Americans became more concerned about all three issues in 2005, their concerns about cigarettes has since stayed the same and those about alcohol declined slightly.

Nearly four in 10 Americans now say obesity is an extremely serious problem to society, more than the 30% who say the same about cigarettes and 18% about alcohol. The percentage who say obesity is an extremely serious problem is also up from 27% in 2005.

Americans Concerns About Obesity Soar, Surpass Smoking