U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline
statnews.com
statnews.com
Covid literally attacks obese people. And obese people also are at huge risk. I'm overweight and I was literally frightened during covid.
Now I lift weights every day and work on my diet very hard.
But we are literally ignoring the elephant (literally) in the room.
The other thing that got brought to my attention was an off handed comment about various health issues that are impacting populations. Things like declining fertility and increasing health issues almost always correlate more with obesity rather than the environmental factors. Yes, correlation is not causation but it does seem at fairly plausible.
For example could things like micro plastics be doing these things? Yes. But one would expect these to be near global - yet the impacts are felt mostly in obese nations. It could potentially be a threat multiplier however.
Americans who live in walkable settings are healthier on average but it’s not like they aren’t exposed to the same chemicals as their suburban counterparts.
To address your main point, many US suburbs are not safe to walk in. Many suburbs lack things like sidewalks, crosswalks, and traffic signals for pedestrians because pedestrians are a complete afterthought. Other places have a sidewalk but no shade, or are by roads with loud high-speed traffic so they're not pleasant to walk in. I've lived in all of these kinds of places and it really affects your willingness to walk anywhere.
I understand what you meant by "walkability". I also don't think it's fun or practical. I tend to visit a lot of different stores, not just one or two. But I only go out shopping once a week or two, not daily. That sounds exhausting.
I also hate super dense living being packed in like sardines with everyone else. It's nice having a house with a decent sized yard and 10+ trees. Plenty of space and isolation, but at the same time close enough to friendly neighbors to socialize with. More Americans should give small to mid size cities a chance. They have a lot to offer. Far cheaper too, our neighborhood definitely isn't wealthy.
It’s often linked to ugly history: when we were shopping around here in the DC area, there were tons of suburban houses with no sidewalks and transit-hostile road design which were built right after the major civil rights wins, when the thinking was that most black people couldn’t afford cars.
> I understand what you meant by "walkability". I also don't think it's fun or practical.
My thinking is that it’s less about fun than barriers to activity and car-centricity. If exercise is something which requires traveling elsewhere or you have to do on will-power an awful lot of people won’t do it very much, especially over time (maybe they walk the exercise trail when they first move in but lose interest over time because there’s only one route and that gets monotonous, etc.). Having kids is eye-opening that way when you’re seeing where they can go safely and under their own power, not to mention parents realizing how long they’ll be playing chauffeur.
The car centric point I mentioned is related: cars are expensive ($11k/year on average in 2019) so when your household has purchased one per adult you typically end up treating them as your default mode of transportation, which over time degrades your body and conditions you to think of being outside of air conditioning as outliers, and cars are dangerous which further reduces your options. Kids are driven to parks 3 blocks away because their parents are worried they’ll get hit by a car; pedestrian routes are hot, noisy, and extra long; etc.
Obviously they’re useful too but I don’t think it’s coincidence that obesity has been going up as an increasingly large fraction of people live in environments designed to be used while sitting sedentary in a machine.
City living isn’t without its own problems but when you get 10k steps without even making an effort to exercise it helps.
It's not exhausting when it's just a couple of blocks away. I live about 5 a minute walk from our local grocery store, so it can be a nice break to pop over there for a couple things multiple times a week. There's no ceremony to it at all since there's no hassle of parking and it's easy to go when the store isn't crowded. An added benefit is that I can plan less and also waste less food, because I go to the store more often and get exactly what I need.
Sure it can be fun occasionally, but I'd hate to do it regularly.
The things you say are all true, but they were also true to a lesser extent in the 60s, when Americans were much less obese than they are now. They're also not true for wild animals.
International comparison. Countries with just as bad chemical/microplastic/PFAS contamination, be it France or China or Japan have far fewer obese people. Coincidentally they also have less car-centric lifestyles.
You're talking about movements over time — it's not like everyone moved out to the suburbs in 1955, and in the 1960s you still had a lot of people living in more urban walkable environments (the riots in the 60s and crime in the 70s really ramped up suburban flight). American leaders were already talking about an obesity crisis by the 1960s (the flawed dietary guidelines in the 1970s were a “we don't have time to wait!” response to decades of that trend) but it just kept getting worse over time, which seems to track with an increasingly car-dominant lifecycle.
That site doesn't have a good reputation and I would especially be careful about drawing conclusions from a single study of one type of animal. There's an especially big confound that many “wild” animals have still had significant habitat disruption from humans and it's not clear whether those macaques have access to human food, crops, etc. which would not otherwise have been the case.
What's the fascination with this word? It seems to be used to add completely unneeded emphasis, rather than anything resembling its original definition.
just filter it out. we all have certain ways that we bias our communications. I certainly do.
> Higher fasting insulin and higher c-reactive protein confound the association between BMI and the risk of all-cause mortality. The increase in mortality that has been attributed to higher BMI is more likely due to hyperinsulinemia and inflammation rather than obesity.
Not sure I understand this sentencen. Are they saying hyperinsulinemia and inflammation are independent of obesity? Both symptoms of <X>?
This was an old theory and some recent research proved that at least it needs to be investigated more seriously.
In general hormones effect on human development, while being quite an active field, seems to be still underfunded or at least more ignored than it should be.
I think I have less than 50g of carbs a day, and probably 1500 calories but I don't track it too closely. I also do strength, but a little each day and make it incidental. I might play with the TRX or do a few pull up or dips at the park while the dogs are off leash.
Something that makes it easier is there are low carb treats and drinks. It does mean taking in more alcohol (as in chemically an alcohol, not ethanol) based sweeteners, so I worry about that a little.
For someone who doesn't go out much this is easy, but in your younger years with social pressure it might take a lot of will power, and even changing your friends and breaking up with partners and so forth to support this kind of habit, since it goes counter to the average person's culture in the west. Especially quitting alcohol too.
I lost a nice bit of weight at the start of the pandemic when I stopped drinking (primarily a beer drinker). It is really surprising how much of an effect it can have.
Personally, while tough to keep that as an average weight, I was successful doing this, primarily by going to one meal a day, and limiting calories (especially carbohydrates). Only issue is your body does end up burning fat, which makes your feel a bit more “oily”.
[0] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/losing-weight-too-fast
If you are on the heavier side and a heavy drinker and carb eater, going low carb/no alcohol you will lose easily 10 kilos in a month (mostly being water weight).
If you are a healthy weight and eating normally with a glass of wine here and there, 0.5-1kg is probably a good range (and probably around 70% of it being fat loss)
If you are lean, 0.25-0.5kg a week is a good goal (and probably 50% will be fat).
One of the greatest failings of our "modern" healthcare system is that there's no plan to address this crisis. Obesity is the gateway to what seems like an infinite amount of health complications - not to mention the additional burden on the health care system itself when they get sick. I fully acknowledge that it's a difficult subject, it upsets people, and it's uncomfortable. The greatest healthcare advice our leaders can give us right now is for everyone to exercise a little more and lost a little weight. Isn't this the perfect time for that? We're coming out of a pandemic and we have the actual data that showed that obese people were uniquely susceptible to bad outcomes from this disease.
What are they supposed to do? Obesity is caused by American's terrible lifestyle. Healthcare systems can only do so much to compensate for a bad lifestyle. Stop drinking alcohol, and start walking everywhere instead of driving.
And this right here is my problem. Healthcare doesn't only begin when you get to the doctor or the hospital. There's no reason that healthcare officials/leaders/experts/whatever can't recommend baseline levels of fitness for Americans, and provide help for getting to that standard. I don't know, maybe Healthcare plans should include subsidies for gym memberships by law.
I live in an extremely walkable neighbourhood of a fairly dense city, and honestly speaking, and just walking around to do my daily chores already helps with casual fitness. I do bike, swim and lift, but mostly for “fun” rather than for health. And before consistently working out, I weighed constant amount (+-4 pounds change depended on the season). Honestly, I want to blame the epidemic on cars and the convenience it brings to everyone.
Maybe we should consider stronger incentives.
Such as “exercise passports”, you can’t enter public spaces unless you did 30 minutes of exercise that day. Would solve the problem very quickly.
Or obesity tax is another practical idea.
I can only imagine the level of added bureaucracy , certifications for gyms to qualify, and spiraling prices for gym users without healthcare plans through white collar salaried jobs. Just look at health care costs over the past 50 years as lengthier and lengthier laws have been passed in the hopes of shifting incentives and otherwise tweaking the system.
medication that treats it like the medical problem it is, instead of berating people for a lack of willpower that they were never missing to begin with, will fix it
> any other country
OK let’s pick Germany. (I’m German.) Most Germans are thin because they don’t eat many carbs at all. Orange juice is expensive and piss-poor compared to sugary American OJ. Breakfast typically consists of unleavened-style breads, mustard, and meats. Gas is super expensive so everybody walks or bikes. But guess what? Obesity is steadily rising there too! Gosh, I wonder why, with all that walking and biking? Wait, I know… They just need MORE walking and biking, that must be it!
With regards to changes in willpower, that seems like a strong assertion, got any sources on that?
100% agree that our diet (generally) has changed drastically.
But I don't get your jump of why medication has to be the solution? Maybe undoing some of the changes that got us here?
Sure, in many cases where they're already well down the road of obesity and experiencing its negative health consequences - yes medication can be useful. But that's far from the only option at hand here.
How is it a strong assertion that willpower HAS NOT changed? Isn’t that the null hypothesis? It seems to me that you’d need evidence that it HAS changed
Our culture is light years away from that in terms of the resilience that's generally expected from people.
Yes, I think it's fair to question the assumption that willpower has not changed.
That was the approach in the 50s and 60s with amphetamines as an appetite killer.
That didn't work out well.
Disclaimer: Been on Mounjaro for 1 month and have lost 15 pounds absolutely effortlessly and with zero side effects
Also, just not being sedentary all day is associated with a ton of positive health outcomes (possibly mental even more than physical) independent of body fat percentage. So it’s worth it all on its own.
Though population level there is also a lot of food policy and incentive structures we could alter to improve diets in general as well.
Limit zoning restrictions that currently make driving everywhere the most convenient choice, stop all freeway expansion projects, and make as many walkable, bikeable, friendly neighborhoods as possible.
If people want/need to go outside and walk or bike to accomplish their daily chores, they won’t need to think about exercise as much because it’ll just be an automatic part of their routine. The best kind of health outcomes are based on societal changes, not personal responsibility (“you need to go to the gym and punish yourself” has been failing us). And people will be happier too, if they are more connected to their community (after the initial grumbling about how “hard” it is). It’s so hard to walk/bike around in the US that I don’t blame people for not doing it more (as an avid walk/run/biker myself).
That doesn’t mean we get rid of all current development and suburbs, but just eliminate the current restrictions which enforce that lifestyle, and let people’s communities start transforming slowly into healthier ones.
you really need to start fresh or force it before hitting the inflection point
By removing zoning restrictions, some communities will start becoming more walkable & mixed-use than others. Since it’s more cost efficient, it’ll be cheaper to own a townhome in a dense area than an equivalent townhome in a sprawling area (after the market equalizes & we can keep up with demand, because it’ll be sky-high for those walkable townhomes at first). But if zoning is reduced, supply will start to catch up.
People in sprawling communities will start needing to pay more for taxes for things like road maintenance etc since they have much higher costs per person than a dense area, further starting to push people to favor dense areas. Are people willing to pay the actual cost of living in remote areas like suburbs?
It’ll happen slowly at first, but just removing the current laws that prohibit that sort of development may actually enable those changes to happen automatically
I could that happening new/growing suburbs outside of cities like that though like as you say if they commit to a sane design/zoning before it's to late
I 100% agree with you though, the physical structure of (most) US cities makes this difficult if you yourself don't prioritize it, or you can't afford to.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4236245/
It's also a huge glaring actor/observer asymmetry issue, you think between the 50's and now human beings innately changed to be lazier, more prone to overconsumption? Why opt for blaming the individual multiplied by 70 million rather than looking at the conditions of their shared environment?
Subdivisions basically didn't exist in the US in the 1950s; they were only just being invented then. People lived in smaller towns and cities and walked around a lot more. Even in the 80s, kids were walking around outside a lot, without adult supervision. Now that's basically illegal in most places, so kids stay in their suburban homes all day playing video games.
And, as usual, you can compare to other countries. In other places, there's less of a car culture, people walk around a lot more, and there aren't many obese people.
I think this urge to blame people for the effects of their environment seen in the one of the parent post is an example of a very dark part of our attitude toward change. It is very easy and tempting to short circuit into ridiculing positive changes in favor of instead attempting to fix it by punishment/shaming ("People will literally rezone entire cities rather than saying we need to eat less food and workout more")
I have never met a fat person who wasn't aware they are fat. I do know two people who have failed to lose significant weight even after bariatric surgery physically restricted how much they could eat.
After even the most extreme medical intervention fails and you are still obese, what can you do? Stay inside your home forever so that thin people are not forced to look at you? Never eat a piece of cake in public? Never go shopping, never date, never dance?
Of course not. In the end the only choice is to live your life anyway, in spite of your reduced opportunities and the judgment you receive from others.
If you're brave, you might even dare to post photos of yourself on Instagram.
"Today, 7 in 10 Americans are obese or overweight, but only 36 percent think they have a weight problem. In other words, close to half the people who are overweight or obese don't think they're overweight or obese."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/01/nearl...
Categorizing a patient as overweight or obese is not discrimination. Dismissing their health concerns or providing lower-quality care because they are fat is. [2]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853419/
[2] https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/weight-bias-hea...
It might actually be worth telling people to eat healthily and excercise as a consistent message before we abandon the idea.
Jokes aside, an environment that softly pushes people towards better choices has a far, far better chance to push them towards these choices than an oppresive self-discipline regime. In the long term, only the former works.
https://reason.com/2022/06/18/mandatory-menu-labeling-still-...
HN is full of people who will accept nuance and complexity in technical discussions. Why not in this area as well, where individual biology, cultural expectations, economic incentives, and environmental factors intersect with personal choice?
Any negative impact of tech on people will have comments saying “well they should have just..."
https://twitter.com/bo66ie29/status/1565100701755314180?s=20...
How many fat people you see?
Do you think human biology changed a lot the past 120 years?
I think just a bit of movement each day and eating healthy food is enough for 99% of people to prevent getting overweight.
Take a group of people from the 1900s and drop them in to the US in 2022, they would likely experience obesity at similar rates.
It's not that people made more virtuous choices in 1900, it's that food was scarcer, less palatable, and more nutritious, and physical activity was a part of daily life.
A busy suburban parent in a 2-income household did not need to squeeze in time to make a home-cooked meal and a Peloton workout around a 9-5 desk job with an hour+ car commute.
We can also look around and see what other countries are doing right (and wrong).
I'm all for encouraging people to eat healthier but some of this is beyond what an average person can control unless you grow your own food and drink from your own well.
there was a post a few days ago about Australia: home-farmed eggs have 40x more lead than the industrial ones, because of unchecked pollution in non-agricultural areas...
Is there any science showcasing exactly what that was?
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/315425.In_Defense_of_Foo...
An interpretation of the obesity epidemic and resulting health crisis is that we are now producing a toxic quantity of food.
He also has a 2-parter on plant sourced fats: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qInpEKHdjXk
Their diet was closer to the food pyramid than mine has ever been. Breakfast every morning was either Quaker oatmeal, Creme of Wheat or a similar cereal, one piece of fruit and coffee. Their lunch and supper was impossibly boring arrangements of sandwiches, meat and potatoes with a vegetable on the side, and the occasional dessert once a week or so.
They didn't "shun" meat per se, but they did live through the depression, WWII rationing, etc, and really weren't used to large quantities of it outside of big holiday dinners.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
Exercise is not the only thing that matters. If you eat twice as much, but exercise only 1.2x as much, you'll still get fat.
This sounds nice until you actually look at most of America. Cities are designed around cars. I'm in a rather walkable city and the nearest grocery store is a mile away. That's not too bad, but other places I've lived it is 5+. Buses are bad (hour+ between pickups) or non-existent. It gets difficult to do all kinds of chores, visit the doctor or whatever. Even using a bike my grocery store shopping becomes a multi-hour experience that I have to do more than once a week where a car is 30 minutes and once every week because I can carry more. The experience is completely different in a city where I would rather actually walk than take a car. I don't think this is an uncommon experience either. What I'm trying to say is that it isn't great to just tell people to start walking but rather to recognize the design and incentives places by that design. The burdens that it creates. If you want people to walk more for their commutes then you need to design cities for walking. I've lived in many places in America where sidewalks are non-existent. If you live in these places and walk you either have a death wish or a DUI. But rather, build it and they will walk.
Since most people are familiar with California I'll provide this reference which breaks it down by county. First graph is adults, second is low income children 5-19, and third graph is low income children 2-4. You will notice how the high obesity rates highly correlate with regions that are difficult to walk around in and are more rural.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percentage-of-Adults-in-...
As another analysis, Not Just Bikes talks about this topic quite a lot. Here's his episode on strodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
Reasonable on the interstate but as your driveway (nor the store entrance) are directly on an interstate, there has to be at least some stretch of slower driving bringing the average down, so the speed on the interstate section would have to be much higher to bring the overall average speed to 72 mph.
Let me give a direct example. I pulled up google maps and what is a 10 minute car prediction (2.8 mi) is also a 54 minute walking estimation (2.7 mi) and a 17 minute bike estimation (2.8 mi). Also, 33-43 minutes by bus fwiw
That does change the numbers; 10 minutes by car being 54 minutes on foot sounds a lot more realistic than 5 minutes by car being 2 hours on foot.
Right, and that's the problem. These cities are a product of choices that Americans have made over many decades, and now they're paying the piper.
>If you want people to walk more for their commutes then you need to design cities for walking.
No, Americans need to choose this for themselves, but they don't and they won't. They don't move to places like this, they don't demand it of their elected officials, they instead just buy big SUVs and move into subdivisions. Americans have chosen this lifestyle, and now it's costing them dearly.
Health care money is limited and obesity kills people with other illnesses by taking away resources.
Healthcare has nothing to do with it. There is no medicine or medical treatment to cure obesity, it's a lifestyle issue
I'd rather put the "failings" in quotes, instead of the modern. Contrary to it failing, it seems to be working rather excellently as business.
Mind you, everything is also more difficult as an obese person, so convincing me to lose weight so that I can e.g run better is really kinda pointless.
Doctors and the medical system can help with the issues around it, and manage the effects, but they are really the wrong place to solve it.
And no, the answer isn't making the streets more walkable (the streets around where I live are pretty walkable), or more places to exercise, since obesity is a diet thing.
And there is the issue, I think. The modern world is outstanding at solving wants by adding things. The problem is here you have to solve a problem by removing things.
I don't think this problem is solvable in the modern world at all, unless you are willing to institute calorie ration cards.
Early on in the pandemic, the NY Times acted shocked, shocked that 7 members of this family all died from COVID
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/nyregion/new-jersey-famil...
As you said, nobody dared mention the 7 elephants in the room. In fact, the Times said:
> "But the virus’s devastating toll on a single family is considered as rare as it is perplexing."
I'm 38 years old, exercise vigorously for 10-12 hours per week, am a healthy weight for my height, have good blood pressure and cholesterol, and have zero known risk factors other than a COVID infection a bit under a year ago. I'm not ready to blame COVID just yet (we're still searching for an underlying cause) but my doctors and nurses all described a highly concerning uptick of strokes over the past few years, including for those like me who are generally in good health.
I was lucky to have recovered with essentially no noticeable deficiencies, but many of those with similar stories I've spoken with in the weeks since weren't so lucky and have permanent impairment.
Besides significant improvements in my work life, the big win for me was eliminating some anger problems that showed up after the TIA, and getting my sense of humor back! Considering my brain is my money maker, it was completely worth it (around $4k for 30 or 40 sessions, I believe).
My TIA involved significant turbulence in my blood flow, so perhaps my capillaries were extra clogged, but you should seriously consider it, if you have any lingering changes. There are quite a few studies about it. The most promising I found involved Oxiracetam, so I included that, as part of my treatment (with my doctors approval, and proper choline supplementation).
As I said in my previous post, I'm extremely lucky. I recovered on my own about 30 minutes post-onset, although I do have a small remaining permanent clot (presumably from the original one breaking up) that has caused permanent injury to a small area that my neurologist says should cause no noticeable impact.
I'm terrified though that even though we haven't found any deficiencies yet, there might be long-lasting personality changes that are harder to pin down. At least so far all my friends seem to believe that I'm still pretty much the same person I was prior to the stroke, which is an enormous relief. But I'll look into that therapy just in case we do find a reason to pursue something like that, thanks!
If I may ask, the worst part of it for me so far is that I haven't had a good night of sleep since. Since it happened while I was sleeping, it's like I don't trust that my body won't try to off me in my sleep again for no reason. So I wake up halfway through the night in a panic that my body is betraying me again, and it takes awhile for me to convince myself that everything is alright to be able to go back to sleep. Have you dealt with anything that at all?
Yeah, I think I went through something similar. The realization of fragility really got to me for a while, and I think my perspective about how temporary life is has permanently shifted. I feel like I'm just more anxious, in general, because I feel like it's going to crash down at some point. It makes me feel like I'm always in a hurry. Maybe it will eventually be a positive, where I came to terms with it, and put more effort to cherish every day, rather realizing it when I'm old, and it's too late?
I would still consider the oxygen therapy, since it could bring back some of the tissue around that clot. I also did it in an attempt to reduce the chances of Alzheimers, which we are now many times more likely to get.
My quality of life decreased after my booster shot. Had severe reaction and my athletic performance dropped quite a bit afterwards never going back to the baseline pre-vaccine. Also having more heart palpitations and a decrease on VO2max.
But apparently when I talk about this, I am either labelled anti-vaxx (even though I got the damn vaccine), a conspiracy crazy or people try to justify my issues with something else that magically coincided with the date I took the booster.
I'm far from antivax, and have had 3 shots myself. But it's crazy that you aren't allowed to talk about this stuff without being labeled a conspiracy theorist.
I did, of course, post my own anecdata. But it's much harder for people to choose whether or not to actually become infected by COVID than it is to decide whether or not to vaccinate.
You'll also note that we are now in fact having the pointless argument I predicted.
Are you vaccinated ? If so, before or after your COVID infection ?
Thanks
I got back into it not long ago and feel I've dodged a bullet, and learned a lot about how not to take health for granted.
Now I'm not saying we need to shame anyone, but saying "healthy at any size" is a terrible lie and in the long term helps no one.
Fat people are literally the only group where it’s just OK to make fun of them, in many circles.
Even for those who are overweight and unhealthy, berating and shaming someone is never going to be a way to help someone heal.
Why is obesity becoming more common when every doctor tells people to lose weight then?
I recommend reading the book, the entire point of which is about shifting one's health efforts from an exclusive focus on weight to a more holistic view.
I.e. even if you can't drop that last 20 pounds (and many people struggle to do so, especially as they age), you should still eat a healthy diet, exercise, limit alcohol intake and avoid smoking.
Obese people are discriminated against in healthcare, employment, and social settings.
Furthermore, numerous studies have show that fat shaming does not lead to weight loss. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6565398/
Shockingly, it turns out if you tell someone with 100 lbs to lose that they are a disgusting lazy piece of shit doomed to an early grave, they tend to withdraw from health care and other social settings, seek comfort in unhealthy habits, and suffer from anxiety and depression. They may give up on their health entirely. After all, if you've struggled your entire life to lose weight and made little progress, then what's the point?
I am obese. I am a tall guy who had been athletic most of my life until moving into the corporate world and spending most of my time at work at a desk. I dont' drink or smoke. I am still quite active on the weekends and weekdays. I am in Japan currently so I walk alot.
But I've still been struggling for the past 8 years trying to lose weight and I even moved to Japan to try to put myself in an environment that generally has healthy food options.
By FAR the biggest impact I've found on my weight is coca cola and other sugary type drinks. Unfortunately I am addicted to it and have a really hard time stopping.
Right now I'm in a good spot, losing weight, and feeling pretty healthy and what helped immensely was Japan restaurants always having green tea and other healthy drink options so it could help me avoid drinking coke. I still love coke and I am always wanting that or dr. pepper or something similar. Whenever I go back to the US and go out to eat I really struggle finding drink options that are healthy and that I enjoy and its so easy to just order a soda.
I imagine that are millions of people that are like me - generally healthy but because they drink coke or other sugary drinks on a regular basis they are killing themselves. I am pretty sure that the obesity situation won't go away if people are drinking sugary drinks all the time like I was. It was super difficult for me to stop in Japan even when I was away from that type of culture.
Additionally there was another post here that I really agree with: "The good news is that maybe we got it backwards, in at least some of the cases[1]: > Higher fasting insulin and higher c-reactive protein confound the association between BMI and the risk of all-cause mortality. The increase in mortality that has been attributed to higher BMI is more likely due to hyperinsulinemia and inflammation rather than obesity."
When COVID started I stopped going outside because of lockdowns and worry about my obesity and it really impacted my health. I started feeling much worse all the time because I wasn't' active and I became very sensitive to the food i was eating. I realized that my blood sugar was going all over the place depending on what I eat and I believe I had high levels of inflammation due to that. I then switched to a diet that balanced my blood sugar much more (Stopped eating pasta, or lots of bread, and other things that spike your blood sugar and switched to eating Kind Bars and mostly protein or green things when i felt hungry) and even before i started losing weight this made a huge difference in my standard of living and how I felt. I was still the same weight but my general health and concentration increased a lot and was one of the reasons I could start having energy to focus on losing weight.
https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/25/cdc-one-year-decline-lif...
(it's literally the same publication from the CDC, just a year later)
At that time, the CDC announced a dramatic decline in life expectancy by extrapolating one-year changes in death rates over the entire expected lifetime of someone born in 2020. This makes small differences look huge. But of course, that's not realistic at all -- we had a significant short-term change in certain age groups (mostly elderly).
When you calculate the impact on life expectancy without assuming that every year after 2020 will look just like 2020, the change is only a few days.
Plenty refuse to talk about rising obesity rates, and it's not only something we can address now but also a massive change (no pun intended) that has taken place in living memory.
I wonder why this is the top voted comment
Being physically active looks to be more important than losing weight: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-022-01209-w
When it comes to Covid, I'd bet on a physically active obese person having a better chance at survival over healthier looking people who aren't active, smoke, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmWTHCHHzZY
It's like not that there are fewer overweight people, they're virtually impossible to find. Today I feel like almost anywhere you look there are people with such problems it's affecting their gait.
I don't think it's constructive to blame the people that have gotten fatter. It really doesn't add up that all these hundreds of millions of people collectively at the same time lost their resolve and and willpower. Seems far more convincing if there are environmental factors at play.
A political side that:
dislikes universal medicine
dislikes decent city planning
dislikes pollution controls
dislikes regulating food advertising
dislikes government health info
dislikes taxing externalities like sugar
dislikes regulating medicines
dislikes harm reduction strategies for addiction
dislikes wearing masks
I could continue...
really doesnt want to talk about those things that they are obviously and provably on the wrong side of. So they've convinced themselves that their political enemies are all saying "being clinically obese is politically correct" and therefore they can get really upset at them for the problem.
Problem is, this is mostly not true. Their political enemies want to stop bullying, and victim blaming and people having body image issues because they don't look like a airbrushed Barbie doll or GI Joe on steroids. Which is good.
Their take on that, presenting it as a threat to health, is just deflection, and while I'm sure they sucked in a few misinformed but well meaning people at first, it feels more and more desperate, more and more deliberate misdirection as time goes on.
We have the web. We have access to academic journals. If the average software dev chooses to be misinformed on these topics then they're no better than a flat earther.
As a result, people eat junk food, go to the doctor less, have more stress, drive everywhere, no mandatory sick leave or vacation in most states. We’re killing ourselves. It’s plainly obvious when you travel abroad and see how well other people live in their countries for a fraction of the costs and stress.
Diamonds are formed under pressure but bread dough rises when it rests… our society needs more time to make healthy food, exercise, and take a vacation…
"In general, since life expectancy has increased, the divisor used to calculate 2022 RMDs for a given age has also increased."[0]
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliejason/2022/03/02/theyre-he...
Of course, as excess deaths increase, average life expectancy will reduce.
Seems many countries have seen a big increase in excess deaths, but thus far the cause is unknown. These 'cause unknown' excess deaths are not attributed to COVID, as COVID deaths are a separate category.
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The last 2 years were outliers in terms experienced mortality. Most likely mortality will not stay elevated in the years to come. But the model does not know this. It simply uses these years to estimate how the mortality will evolve.
Now, one can say that some people will experience long covid, so their mortality rate will stay elevated for years to come. Fair, but that does not apply to people of age 0 (newborns), which is what this life expectancy number that's being reported is. For those people, the life expectancy will not be lower than before Covid, if anything it will be slightly higher (corresponding to 2 years of progress).
True statement but it should be the other way around. Deaths by overdoses are much more impactful in terms of life expectancy decline, since they mostly kill younger people.
Then we'd have to look at how younger generations were sacrificed for the older.
Then we might have to talk about how that happens in many areas, from wealth distribution to climate change policy, from environmental policy to corporate accountability. Not to mention the wars.
Can't be letting that type of discussion into the zeitgeist. Wealthy people might get upset.
It requires an incredible amount of privilege to buy into the Covid narrative that got sold to people.
I know there's a cohort of people that are pointing out at a certain national level field experiment as the cause of increased mortality, but there are also very valid reasons why we would see an increase in mortality now. More data will reveal to which degree each group is correct, and thankfully, we have a robust control group.
Imagine what would have been different if we used the industry standard way if measuring this sort of thing…
This, of course, actually depends on the numbers from both (both ages and volumes).
The graph has a very clear inflection point from 2019 to 2020, overdoses were increasing for quite a while before that, so do you actually have numbers suggesting that the 2020 and 2021 impact of overdoses and accidents is greater than the completely-new-to-those-years factor?
Let's say the average age of someone who dies from Covid is 75. Their life expectancy is another 11 years. [4] And someone who dies from an overdose or accident at 30 would have had another 48 years on average. There would have to be (400,000*11)/48 = 92,000 (rough math) additional overdose and accident deaths to come close to the impact Covid has had on life expectancy decline.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...
[3] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
And it is going to decline further. Covid affects multiple organ systems; the acute phase of the infection, it is safe to say at this point, is not the primary cause of concern.
Covid-19 infection increases the chances of a stroke 4x and of heart failure more than 10x, among other disorders, within 12 months of infection. [1] A chief scientist at the WHO recently said [2], “We need to prepare for large increases in cardiovascular, neurological & mental health disorders in countries affected by the #SARSCoV2 #pandemic.”
[1]: https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1564612325356670978
[2]: https://twitter.com/doctorsoumya/status/1564649057599078401
Preprint of a major study from VA data. It will probably publish in the near future and I haven't heard any major changes or revisions.
Per the paper's abstract:
> We show that COMPARED TO PEOPLE WITH FIRST INFECTION, reinfection contributes additional risks of all-cause mortality, hospitalization, and adverse health outcomes
(emphasis mine)
All this paper shows is that if you follow a cohort of older, sicker people -- people who are seeking hospital care! people who were infected and possibly hospitalized in the first wave! -- long enough for them to get multiple reinfections (in this case, about 2 years, from the original Covid wave through the Omicron wave), the overall rates of a (selected) set of different health conditions goes up over time. They have not shown that the increased risk is because of Covid. The paper has no way of following the younger, healthier people (particularly in the later waves, where home testing was common) who never set foot in a VA hospital and had a Covid test, despite having Covid. There is a huge selection bias [1] problem here. There may be others, such as immortal time bias. [2]
What you would like to see in a study like this is that it is prospective (the participants were selected randomly in advance and followed over time); but this study is retrospective. You would also like to see a control against a similar illness, such as flu or non-Covid pneumonia; this study does not have such a comparison (despite being trivial to make), and resorts to using "atopic dermatitis and neoplasms" as a "negative control" instead.
As an aside, Al Aly has a history of using a weird grab-bag of negative control illnesses against this same dataset across his various papers. One wonders why he doesn't always use the same illness as a negative control -- presumably atopic dermatitis didn't suddenly start being unassociated with Covid between his studies, right? Would the results not be the same if he was consistent? I'm guessing not.
In short, this study is confounded, and Eric Topol really needs to tone down his fear-mongering. Even if you believe the top-line results, unless you are an elderly person sick enough to be seeking regular hospital care, this has very little relevance to your risk profile.
Except for the parts where I point out that this result is confounded by the advanced age and morbidity of the study population; the health-seeking behavior that led to their inclusion; and the fact that they're all getting older across the course of the study (which tends to result in higher rates of death, illness and relocation to Florida. I wonder if he found that Covid caused higher rates of golfer's elbow?)
Also, no, the study didn't show anything is "creating" anything else. It argued that there's a correlation.
The results section of the paper updates this knowledge. It says:
“Compared to those with first infection, those with reinfection exhibited increased risk and excess burden of all-cause mortality, hospitalization, and at least one sequela in the acute phase and the post-acute phase of the reinfection.”
“… the risk was higher in those who had two infections (HR 2.11 (2.07, 2.15); burden 234.58 (227.08, 241.92)), and highest in those with three or more infections (HR 3.00 (2.71, 3.31) …”
There's only one novel pandemic to study every century or so. I don't think there's any evidence at all that it's "so different". It's just better studied because in 1918 only a handful of scientists even knew that "viruses" existed.
For everybody or for some people? What is the causal chain?
COVID-19 does massive damage generally.
The study it is based on is from Al Aly [1], who is using a dataset of (mostly elderly, unhealthy) veterans who regularly seek hospital care from the US government hospital system (VA).
It is an older, sicker population, and no, the results aren't generalizable. Moreover, his methods are dubious. I've dug into one of Al Aly's other paper's downthread [2], and the comments cross-apply. He has a bunch of papers using the same dataset and core methods, and they're all pretty bad, but the press loves them. Eric Topol is either ignorant of their problems, doesn't care, or a little of both.
As an editorial aside, Eric Topol really isn't a reliable source of information. He's pretty much on par with Eric Feigl-Ding at this point. He's someone who has surrendered all former scientific credibility to sensationalism. Even if you 100% believe every word in these papers, unless you acknowledge that they're a study of older, sick people, you're sensationalizing the results and misleading the listener.
For example, there's absolutely nothing stopping Al Aly from using a real, consistent control (e.g. influenza, or even just the same negative control) instead of a grab-bag of different illnesses. The reason he switches them with every paper is probably because his synthetic weighting scheme produces inconvenient results from experiment to experiment when the same control is used. But we can only speculate, because we don't have the data. Remember: he's re-weighting his covariates using these controls! This is a real, objective problem.
My opinions about Topol are my own, which is why I said they're editorial, but I'm tired of the guy's constant doom-and-gloom messaging and inability/unwillingness to critically appraise data. Even in the most charitable, rational take on Al Aly's work, you can't casually extrapolate it to the entire population the way that Topol does.
Lazy? Guilty as charged.
More data is needed, but it's looking like a key component of it is micro-clots: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02286-7
Can we have a statistical analysis for the lockdowns and curfews? Do incitations at being a couch potato have an impact on life expectancy?
Outside of the cities, the opioid crisis has claimed the lives of millions. I have had friends and family die from overdose and complications from over-prescription.
It’s no secret; addressing the problem would cost drug manufacturers billions, which is why nothing is being done IMO
[1]: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/overdose-deaths-s...
It'd be nice to see data compiled showing the relation of mean, median, and mode, plotted over time, for life expectancy data. At the very least it'd likely help curb inflation, as people recognize that they're going to need a lot more retirement savings if they're suddenly saving for an extra decade than they were expecting using statistics improperly...
Anyway, in terms of measuring overall society, mean is better than median for life expectancy, since it gives effectively more weight to earlier death. Median/mode would be more useful for individual.
https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/life-expe...
Since then we dropped basically all restrictions and have had 14,000 COVID deaths (all mostly this year, we had about 2,200 from the start of the pandemic to the end of 2021) which weirdly aren’t talked about in the media at all, whereas you’d hear about the daily death count every day during outbreaks in 2020 and 2021…
There's a strong correlation between state life expectancy and whether that state has embraced the ACA expansion of Medicaid as well:
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-med...
https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/rymQuY4oUyBsIi4HPbxRAP/Is-M... (Bloomberg article outside paywall).
This data next year will be very telling to see the true efficacy of strict lockdowns (I suspect very effective at preventing death since vaccines arrived so quickly). Australia data should be interesting next year (very strict to very lax after vaccines).
Just in legislative health spending, and in spending by the Exectuive you're talking $1.2 TT dollars spent (with much more still allocated)[1].
Imagine if just 1% of that went towards cardiovascular health. We could have seriously moved the needle on the cause of diseases that consistently kills orders of magnitude more people. And sure, COVID had three months when it was the leading cause of death[2]. But just heart disease, kills nearly as many people every month.
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[1] https://www.covidmoneytracker.org
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254560/leading-causes-o...
* If the vaccine is safe and effective, life expectancy would improve some over 2020
* If the vaccine is safe and ineffective, life expectancy would stay about the same as 2020
* If the vaccine is unsafe and ineffective, life expectency would drop below 2020
We are now witnessing the third outcome.
Also your logic is wrong. If vaccine is safe and effective, the life expectancy would remain the same (IE: no additional deaths due to covid)
You're trying to make a point and not making a very good job of it.
But like GP said, the conditional statements themselves presuppose that vaccines are the only variable affecting life expectancy. But that's not true, there are other factors.
Terribly boring, wouldn’t you agree? But often the boring data is the correct data, or in other words: averages tend to represent a trend better than outliers.
If we accept that as a premise, it becomes difficult to explain why for instance the Canadian life expectancy increased in 2021 as another commenter noted, despite being society that is similar in many ways but with a higher vaccination rate.
>Terribly boring, wouldn’t you agree? But often the boring data is the correct data, or in other words: averages tend to represent a trend better than outliers.
I agree with this advice, hence the need to look at countries outside of the US and to consider the US's traditional life expectancy woes compared to other developed or OECD countries.
- 68% fully vaccinated in USA, dropped life expectancy in 2021
- 86% fully vaccinated in Canada, increased life expectancy in 2021
Obviously there are a lot of other potential variables, but it’s hard to make a judgement purely based on vaccination and implying they are unsafe.
Not sure how that translates to life expectancy
So we need to carefully select individuals in both groups to be similar in there regards, or control for it statistically.
We will find out --some day soon-- if this vaccine was contributing to health or contributing to deaths. Given the fact that Pfizer wanted to hide the side-effects list from the public for 75 years I'm afraid it is the latter.
A large number of Canadian doctors also died suddenly and unexpectedly.
I’ve sadly witnessed it happen before.
The forth chart from the top "ages 10-59"
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-a...
This site is very pro vaccine, but even here they have to do a lot of hand waving to try and explain it away. And Suddenly everything is fuzzy, they can't quite put the two together. Which is almost funny considering these same people were touting the effectiveness of the vaccine on cherry picked statistical data with utmost certainty.
APPENDIX 1. LIST OF ADVERSE EVENTS OF SPECIAL INTEREST from the pfizers own study.
http://supremelaw.org/authors/pfizer/1290.adverse.events.htm
Here's another one, young person, story from today.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/ayr-centen...
[Edit] Corrected the link https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-a...
Can you think of any confounding issues among those samples when split only by vaccination status?
Like maybe the median age or percent with AARP memberships?
"In the UK, ages 1-59 year olds are dying at almost eight time the rate if they don't have any baby tooth left and don't absurdly love dinosaurs".
The fact that people have to actually write the whole data analysis down is mind boggling, because it's so trivial to understand the reason.
Still, this is the conclusion : "Thus, the results we see in the actual UK all-cause deaths for fully vaccinated and unvaccinated is not unexpected, and can be fully explained by the Simpson's paradox artifact since the observed ratio of vaccinated:unvaccinated all cause death rates, 1.82x in week 30, is less than the expected background ratio of 2.41x based on their disparate age distributions."
That's not "a lot of hand waving to try and explain it away". They do a very methodical and sensible mathematical analysis of the data at hand, including the initial data point, to explain a very simple thing : people tend to die older overall, and older dying people tend to vaccinate more.