Stress is an issue that I don’t think gets enough credit.
Obesity, PFAS, all the other current top candidates are absolutely a part, but I think the stress of living under our economic/political system is causing a lot of this.
Stress causes inflammation, inflammation causes all kinds of issues. You can think of stress as an inverted proxy for wealth on a population level as well.
Stress as a concept was only invented ~100 years ago.
I do wonder if perhaps it wasn't our environment that suddenly became stressful (all your family at risk of dying of the plague has to be more stressful than missing a deadline set by your boss).
Perhaps vulnerability to stress is caused by some other, as yet unidentified factor that suddenly became big around 1900?
I agree, and you know what else went away when I switched to a whole food diet? My sleep issues. All my life I've suffered from C-PTSD and had terrible sleep patterns. Yet, when I cooked for myself and ate wholesome, organic foods with lots of fruits and veg, I woke up like clockwork, with the sun, and I slept peacefully, all night every night. It was miraculous. Absolutely a miracle.
It would be very interesting to look at life expectancy trends over time for income quantiles in the US and other developed countries. My understanding is that there is are large differences in life expectancy associated with income and wealth in the US. I wonder if those differences are as dramatic in countries with longer life expectancies.
The whole article is worth a read, but the throughline is that there is no coherent public health policy in the US. Most other countries with a similar level of development invest more in public health and have more equitable access to screening, vaccinations, etc. By the time people get hospitalized, most of the damage is already done.
"American children are less likely to live to age 5 than children in other high-income countries," the authors write on the second page. It goes on: "Even Americans with healthy behaviors, for example, those who are not obese or do not smoke, appear to have higher disease rates than their peers in other countries."
A quick search of leading causes of deaths for children under 5 is firearms and second motor vehicle accidents. I do wonder what would cause other wise healthy adults to have higher disease rates than other countries.
I hear more about don't drink or even don't shower orders in Michigan and Mississippi etc. than I do in Europe. Also groundwater contaminations like PG&E hexavalent chromium or Palestine vinyl chloride. American culture is quite a thing. Does anywhere else talk about things like the EPA as a New World Order conspiracy or have a political party that is popular because it proudly brags about letting companies pollute more?
Not to mention... the cars. So many cars. Such big cars. And no walking.
> I do wonder what would cause other wise healthy adults to have higher disease rates than other countries.
Possibly a measurement difference. More frequent testing leads to both earlier detection and thus higher reported occurrence. Another factor might be that it gives more false positives and thus higher stress levels and from that, higher incidence of various disorders.
But also, the article doesn’t exactly say “other wise healthy adults“, it says “Americans with healthy behaviors, for example, those who are not obese or do not smoke”. Those people might have a disease from bad habits they had earlier in live. They also may not have truly bad habits, but yet lead a more sedentary live than similar groups in other countries, etc.
Were cities less automobile centric in the '70s, when the obesity rate was far lower? According to the CDC, physical activity has actually risen significantly in recent decades (https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/data/index.html#:~:text....) People tend to blame fast food, "HFCS," walking, big pharma or whatever else, while largely ignoring the simply incredible amount of food Americans now eat.
Exercise is important, but walking can only do so much when the average American eats almost seven Big Macs worth of calories daily (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_ener...). You can have a Big Mac meal with fries and evil HFCS soda three times a day and still eat fewer calories than the average American. An extra mile a day of walking burns about 100 calories, or just over 1 Oreo.
The lever works the other way. A person who walks for their daily errands or for commuting, will not get overweight. Or otherwise they wouldn't be able to walk. So they won't eat as much. It's not the calories burned by walking that makes them thin, it's the integration of walking into daily life that provides the unconscious cues to eat healthier.
I don’t see your first link supporting the claim “physical activity has actually risen significantly in recent decades”. When I click through that first link, I eventually get at https://journals.humankinetics.com/downloadpdf/journals/jpah..., which is about self-reported physical activity and thus “subject to recall and social desirability biases.”
It also only is about leisure time physical activity. So, if a subject buys a robot lawn mower, stops mowing the garden every week, and starts driving to the gym to do half an hour of moderate exercise once a month, the number measured here goes up.
Ignoring those, it says
“The prevalence of insufficient activity was not significantly different in 2018 compared with 1998 for most subgroups (Table 3), with exceptions of increases among men, adults aged 65 years or older, adults of Hispanic origin, adults with less than a high school education, adults in the Midwest or South Census regions, and adults with obesity, and a decrease among adults with a college degree or higher.”
and
“recent increases in meeting or exceeding the guideline overall are primarily driven by more people reporting sufficient activity to meet the high guideline, not the minimal guideline.”
So, it seems any increase in exercise comes from those already doing it doing more of it.
Probably nuclear holocaust. Americans in my experience just don't understand why car-based cities are so awful, and even when they think they want a walkable city and lifestyle, they're completely unable to actually make the sacrifices necessary to live that way (for instance, not getting an SUV-full of groceries every few weeks and shopping more frequently, buying only what you can carry home).
A vehicle full of groceries every week is more efficient than going two or three times a week. More time efficient, and requires less resources/power. I live walking distance to a grocery store and still go once a week or less. I bring a pull wagon that I park in front of the store, fill it up, and walk it back home.
The problem is, a lot of our cities are fundamentally hostile to pedestrians. Even if you're actually close enough to walk to a grocery store (most are not), you may be afraid to cross streets with numerous lanes of speeding cars without dedicated crosswalks. In my city, it's common to hear stories of bicyclists in hit-and-runs; it doesn't exactly make people comfortable with walking and biking around their city.
This is because Americans, by and large, do not demand better infrastructure from their leaders, don't vote for it, and don't actively move to places that are better for walking/cycling. Americans are perfectly happy to move to some far-out subdivision that's not walkable to anyplace, just because the house price is a bit lower; then they sit around and make complaints like yours. Put your money where your mouth is.
With the pandemic, we saw lots of Americans move from these walkable places to completely un-walkable places in Florida because they were working from home now, and could afford a bigger house there.
American cities are the way they are because that's what Americans want, and that's what they buy. If Americans really wanted to live in walkable places, they'd refuse to move to or buy homes in places that aren't walkable. That's just not what we see.
This comes across as out of touch. The house differences are not just "a bit lower" - for many it can mean the difference between being able to purchase a house at all.
>A vehicle full of groceries means you don't have fresh groceries for most of the time.
Luckily we invented refrigerators so this is not an issue. Things can stay fresh and just as healthy for weeks.
>More resources? If you're walking to the store, this shouldn't be an issue, and in fact is a negative. Avoiding walking is why Americans are so fat.
As in, buying in bulk saves money and resources versus buying in small amounts. Indeed Americans are fat, but adding a few walks here and there isn't going to fix that. American diet is absolute garbage and the portions are insane.
>Try keeping sushi in a fridge for a few weeks and then eating it, and see what happens to you. Many vegetables don't do well in a fridge either, and wilt after a few days.
Luckily we've invented these things called freezers, and most refrigerators come with them. Veggies will last weeks in there, if not longer.
I wish society learned that exercise is not how you combat obesity.
While I agree that movement is the secret to a healthier life, the obesity epidemic is due to increasing levels of sugars and carbs in the diet, and having been convinced that fats are bad by medical crooks and the food industry.
In fact everybody is looking forward to hyper-processed fake meat which takes us further and further away from the plain, natural food our bodies thrive on.
Movement increases your caloric expenditure by relatively small amounts. It is great if you tend to eat close to your daily expenditure, but if you eat a lot of non-satiating, calorie-dense foods like sweets or refined carbs, good luck walking them off.
For reference, 1 hour walk is ~300 kcal. That's 3 slices of white bread, or a little more than a half-litre bottle of Coke. How many people overeat by that amount, and how many walk at least one hour every day?
Countries where people move more also eat less. Because we are a complex chemical machine, not a dumb furnace.
Eat too much -> metabolic syndrome -> exercise becomes more difficult and tiring -> psychological/satiety issues -> overeat -> GOTO 10. We now know how obesity works, but it doesn't fit on a slogan short enough to write on a cereal box or in a doctor's office poster, so they just tell people to walk more and skip red meat, even though it completely misses the point.
Apparently copious unfulfilling underpaid labor may lead to escapism. Simultaneously we're exporting inflation to our southern neighbors who have a robust, lucrative industry which may lead to conditions favoring that fate.
Shockingly, glorification of drug use (of all kinds; sugars and attention and plants alike) in all forms of media (which is itself prevalent and pervasive for most) along with similar glorification of rebellion against "normal" creates a maelstrom of influence on people of all ages, beliefs, and origins.
The original claim was that lowered life expectancy was due to drug overdoses. Drug overdoses account for only 3% of all deaths. How much does the fact that 62% of them were under 44 move the needle?
In 2020, life expectancy was 77 years; an increase of 1% of the total number (before the increase) of deaths occurring at 44 (33 years below expectancy reduces life expectancy by 0.327-ish years on its own.
Again, only 3% of all deaths are from overdoses. If you assume that all of them lived to 77 instead of 44, that would make a difference of about 1 year in total life expectancy.
Obesity, PFAS, all the other current top candidates are absolutely a part, but I think the stress of living under our economic/political system is causing a lot of this.
Stress causes inflammation, inflammation causes all kinds of issues. You can think of stress as an inverted proxy for wealth on a population level as well.