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How bad can America’s health actually get? And what shall we do?
All kinds of ill health are steadily increasing, from age-adjusted obesity to autism and depression. Anxiety in young adults nearly doubled in the decade pre-pandemic. Type 1 and type 2 diabetes has risen dramatically. Deaths of despair have also risen. There seems to be no actionable plan, ready for implementation, to halt the rising tide of ill health. The numbers are steadily increasing adjusted for age, with some numbers rising faster in the young than in the old.
I find the willpower discussions to be missing the point. Unless there is a plan that we can implement in schools to significantly increase or teach willpower, then it hardly matters whether the will is relevant. The diseased from poor choices and the diseased from poor environment equally hurt the security of the nation, costing trillions from decreased productivity, decreased fertility, and healthcare expenditure. It is curious how much discourse in America is spent quibbling on issues that are so much less important than the health question. Health is something that directly impacts every aspect of the country, not the least of which is the plain happiness and fertility of citizens.
What I would like to see is a harm tax put in place that adds onto every unhealthy item the cost per item of its societal harm: the projected healthcare costs, the loss from intelligent citizens working for corporations that poison us, the projected loss of productivity. Now, this will always be an estimate, but so are many taxes. I think this would largely make sodas prohibitively expensive.
Somewhat surprisingly, only 1/150 kids are diagnosed with autism. I thought it would be higher than that given all the attention it has gotten and the alarmist language by the media when talking about it. This is still really rare compared to diabetes and other problems.
I wonder how much the increase in diabetes is due to increased diagnosis such as borderline diabetes cases that would have been ignored 20 years ago.
I don't see any reasons for these problems to get better. Food is too tasty and cheap and abundant. People don't seem that cornered about these health consequences, because someone else will always pay for the treatment. It's like a bottomless pit of money.
There is no such thing as borderline type 1, and symptomatic type 1 diabetes is very easy to diagnose (and kills you within months if you ignore it). So increased diagnosis is not the cause of increased type 1 diabetes.
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