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Borrowing a line from President Obama’s playbook, the Centers for Disease Control said today that community organizing for change is necessary — in this case to deal with the obesity crisis.

Focusing on community-based changes, not individuals’ efforts to lose weight, is critical, William Dietz, the CDC’s director in the division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity, told reporters during the agency’s first conference on the obesity crisis.

The estimated annual medical costs due to obesity nearly doubled to $147 billion in 2008 from $78.5 billion in 1998, as the obesity rate rose 37% during the period, according to an article published online today in the journal Health Affairs and highlighted during the conference. Normal weight individuals incurred an average of 42% less in medical expenditures — about $3,400 for per person per year — compared with obese individuals, who incurred an average of about $4,800 in such expenses.

Prescription drugs are one “significant driver” behind those costs: They cost $700 a year from normal weight individuals and $1,300 a year for obese individuals, according to Eric Finkelstein, first author on the study and a health economist at RTI International.

On Friday, the CDC published 24 community-centered recommendations for how to combat obesity, including strategies for promoting healthier foods, exercise and how to encourage communities to organize for change. (Read here for the strategies.)

The question now, says Dietz, is how many of these strategies need to be implemented. “What does it really take to change the needle?” he asked rhetorically during the conference call. “It’s clear that we’re moving from the what and the why to the how.”

Bonus obesity: Thomas Frieden, head of the CDC, said that any strategy that increases availability and decreases price of healthy foods — and decreases the availability and increases the price of unhealthy ones — “is likely to be effective,” including taxing soda. The challenge of whether one will be implemented, he says, “is a political one”.

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To Fight Obesity Epidemic, It Takes a Village, CDC Says