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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.
In principle, such a tax is a fine idea. In practice, I can go to the CDC website and see that their nutrition recommendations are terrible. Worse still, I can see from Covid policies and noises being made around climate change that these taxes would be selected based on so many biased political preferences that I'm skeptical of whether they'd make any sense at all. You're not getting a reduction in estrogenic microplastics, you're getting bans on beef because The Science^tm says that red meat is bad.
On a personal level, I would resent being taxed for other people's bad behavior. During long runs and bike rides, I eat packets that are literally just pure sugar, because if you fail to do that, you will run out of energy. These would be labeled as "bad for you" by pretty much any broadly applied nutrition standard and I'd be charged more. This is an example that I'm personally familiar with, but I'm sure there are a million more that people with different circumstances could come up with.
I have no suggestions that I think are useful, scalable, and politically plausible. Things will simply get worse unless a wild deus ex machina appears to bail us out.
The first page I found seems reasonable?
[ hmm - I can't seem to get lists to work well inside quotes ]
That's half good, half bad advice. They still are riding the "fat is bad" train and wrongly advising against fatty milk and meat. They are hopeless and should never be given legal authority over food.
Given that most people eat far too many calories and fat-free milk has 25% fewer calories than 2% milk, isn't it reasonable to advise against fatty milk? I know the jury is still out on saturated fats, but I thought trans fat was almost universally considered bad?
So, from my perspective, I see them batting 17.5/18, which seems pretty good
Milk's a good source of fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamin K, but these are obviously found in the fat portion of the emulsion and removing the fat removes them. So milk is one of the worst places to try to cut calories.
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