The calculable chronic disease costs are similar. There’s some evidence that red meat intake may increase risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality, but like many of the speculative externalities discussed below, it’s impossible to assign a cost to this. (If red meat were further implicated in cardiovascular disease, the true costs of a burger would rise significantly.)

In any case, a main factor in the rise of obesity has been an increase in the availability of calorie-dense foods, and burgers played a big role in this process. Between 1970 and 2000, per capita calorie intake increased by 24 percent, and the “food-away-from-home sector” grew to nearly half of all food we eat. Restaurants, of course, are the source of most burger consumption.

Between 2007 and 2010, 11.3 percent of adult Americans’ daily caloric intake came from fast food. Correlation is not causation, of course, and it seems likely that foods high in sugar and other hyperprocessed carbohydrates are most responsible for high obesity rates, but burgers certainly played a role in rising caloric intake.

To estimate the share of obesity-related costs resulting from burger consumption, we estimated the share of calories coming from burgers in fast-food restaurants, where the majority are eaten. Assuming that the 11.3 percent of calories is proportional to the incidence rate of obesity (it may be higher), its associated health risks, and its treatment costs, up to 15 percent of fast food’s share of direct and indirect costs arising from obesity (about 1.65 percent of the whole) are attributable to burgers.

The link between obesity and a handful of deadly chronic diseases — arthritis, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, Type 2 diabetes and some cancers, among others — is well documented, as is their enormous economic burden. Direct medical diet-related costs are currently pegged at about $231 billion annually.

These numbers above would mean that this cost of burgers is about $4 billion per year (from fast food burgers only!), which averages out to 48 cents per burger. (Some put these costs five or six times as high, and there are indirect costs as well; again, we’re being conservative.) And between 2010 and 2030, the combined costs arising directly from diseases related to obesity could increase by an additional $52 to $71 billion each year. This could double the cost per burger in additional health costs alone.

Some other costs are only vaguely calculable, and we have numbers, but the ranges are so great that they’re useless; what matters, though, is that the numbers are above zero. There are elevated nitrates in water supplies resulting from the chemical fertilizers used to grow corn to feed cattle (the city of Des Moines has been forced to spend $3.7 million to build a water treatment facility for precisely this reason; then there’s the famous “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico); the cost of food stamps and other public welfare programs made necessary in part by the ultralow wages paid at most fast-food operations; the beef industry’s role in increasing antibiotic resistance, which costs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, something like $55 billion a year; some measure of E. coli illnesses; and land erosion, pesticide residues, direct corn subsidies, injury rates at slaughterhouses, and so on.