Rural Americans are dying younger, living less healthy lives, report reveals

Access to American health care has jack shit in common with being able to live a healthy lifestyle. You can learn the latter from personal trainers, self-help books, physical education, sports involvement, all sorts of ways. Then you summon the discipline to adhere to such a lifestyle, and there's nothing a physician can do to influence those decisions.

The American health care system may be useful in cases of GSW or cardiac events or broken limbs, but people who use it exceedingly sparingly are the ones who end up enjoying health and wellness, without being inexorably steered into a pharmacy or chemotherapy.

Follow the money here: look at some maps; I've found in my urban area that FQHCs open up to take Medicaid/Medicare dollars for services to the poor and vulnerable. In the affluent neighborhoods, you'll find cosmetic clinics and surgeons, along with massage, spas, and boutique concierge naturopaths and other alternative practitioners. (None of the above are proven to extend lifespans nor improve outcomes for the sick.)

Don't believe me? Ask practicing physicians, who are utterly exasperated and fed up with all the patients who abused/neglected their bodies and now expect medicine to "fix them up" like the Tech Support desk. They can do nothing of the kind. Hopefully, they are compassionate and honest about those limitations.

Speaking as someone who lives in a rural area - this ain't it. The lifestyle choices are the biggest problem. Availability is just addressing the problem at the end of the problem.

The same is true for men of rural areas who are left to perish and become hopeless.

You'll die faster from hopelessness than any lifestyle choice.

That was supposed to be "self-medication", but we may have stumbled upon another idea here.

The entire food system is fucked, and it takes Herculean strength to overcome it.

Potatoes you don't want to go overboard on, but as carbs go they're among the better ones -- better than bread -- because their glycemic index is lower. And with the skins on they have nontrivial vitamin/mineral content.

If you did a little more cooking at home, particularly with beans (not in sugary ketchup, just beans with butter and spices -- salt, pepper, cumin, say), then you'd be a bit better, on account of the fiber. Add frozen or, failing that, canned vegetables, and you're almost actually good.

Often you can find canned chilli that's nutritionally pretty good; just make sure it doesn't have sugar; they put sugar in too much stuff.

Getting more of your calories from nuts is also a good option. Surely you can get a jar of peanuts? A large handful is 300 kcal. A couple of those spaced over the day can fuel you quite well with a slow burn.

The car-deprndrnce of the country is an issue; you probably would not naturally walk far enough. If there's some way to schedule in about two miles a day -- walk to the gas station for a black coffee? -- then that'd help to maintain some minimal baseline levels of activity.

Stick to the calorie count and maintain some (frankly modest) level of light exercise and you can maintain your health in a fairly wide range of circumstances.

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I get what you mean though. There's a real class difference. You go to higher class places and there are plenty of salad places around. You go to low class places and there's fast food junk. The latter isn't even much cheaper. It's enough to make you start wondering if people are in the classes they are because of the standards they have. That's not a comfortable thought, but, when you look at how all the bankers seem to also have good gym routines, you really do start to wonder.

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You don't need to do anything superhuman though. You don't need to even summon the willpower to hit the elliptical machine every day. If you just think about what you're eating, count calories, reduce sugar and fast carbs, and walk a bit, you'll do pretty well.