Healthy Future US Blog

The recent health news double-feature was really scary: 1.  40% of Adults Obese 2.  1 in 5 Adolescents with Prediabetes Then came the even-more-shocking news on the “sequels”: For adults: “ Severe obesity  is likely to become the most common BMI category among...low-income adults”--  close to 1 in 3 >75-100 pounds overweight by 2030 --when about 50% of adults will be obese nationwide . For teens with prediabetes:  “However, compared with adults, decline in β-cell function seems to occur at an accelerated rate resulting in relative insulin deficiency and progression to overt type 2 diabetes  with insulin treatment needed to control hyperglycemia within a few years after diagnosis .” Let us be clear what this means: High child obesity (~20% nationally now) is leading to very high adult obesity (40% now, going to 50%+) and  severe obesity (1 in 12 adults now, going to 1 in 4 in 2030 ). Unlike typical adult-onset diabetes

Just submitted the following letter to the editor to The Atlantic, in response to     https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/598297/physical-education/ : Making grants without requiring high-quality evidence-based strategies, as Texas Fitness Now did, often does not end well--especially when combined with “bad PE” at a number of schools.  But contradicting the stereotypes,  Desy, Peterson & Brockman showed  that “gym” is actually the favorite subject of many middle-schoolers.  So beware the unintended collateral damage:  continuing to slash PE (& recess) risks further  demotivating large numbers of students , many of whom are already at-risk.  “No PE” may be even more of a threat to student engagement & success than “bad PE.”  And we should not look at this issue in isolation.  How can we keep cutting physical education, as we enter our 5 th  decade of a deadly serious  chronic disease epidemic now affecting the majority of Americans —especially when so much di

There were a number of good insights and promising strategies described in the Healthy Eating, Active Living special supplement of SSIR Summer 2019.    Yet the authors also admitted that child obesity and adult chronic diseases continue to grow. One key weakness of the social determinants of health (SDOH) framework is that there are so many challenging “determinants,” that scarce resources for change can get spread and diluted.   So we end up with good SDOH change anecdotes—while actual state & national health statistics worsen. To maximize impact, especially to reach the tipping point of actually reversing 40+ years of worsening health habits, we need to prioritize.   One highly promising “80/20” (and, yes, SDOH) strategy is through K-12 schools—literally with 20% of the US population, for 13 years, at just the right developmental stage to learn and change.   There are scalable, low cost, school-based strategies that dramatically increase fitness & activity, impro

We meet them all the time:  people trapped in their job, in order to keep their health benefits.   We need a study on the negative impact on entrepreneurship and the economy from people health-handcuffed to their current jobs.  From my limited anecdoctal evidence, the costs are astronomical.   Two-income families have made the labor market much more geographically immobile, and now health insurance is exacerbating the job-jail. Modern Healthcare just summarized results of a new Peterson-Kaiser study  on employer health insurance and the actual cost to employee families, of the combination of employee share of premiums plus employee out-of-pocket health costs. Employers keep shifting more and more health costs to employees. The only good news is that employers are still paying a (fast-shrinking) % of premiums--so health costs are still cheaper than being self-employed.  [Also, if we end up back in the uncovered pre-existing conditions bad-old-days again, expensive employer heal

The headline reads: Cancer Deaths Decline 27% Over 25 Years But the subheadline reads, rather ominously:  Improvement reflects reduced smoking but obesity could influence future projections Yes, indeed:  the American Cancer Society declares that obesity has ALREADY become the second biggest preventable cause of cancer, after smoking.  And the Mayo Clinic reinforces that with the slogan:  "Sitting is the New Smoking." We reached our highest cancer mortality rate in the early 1990s, following inevitably after our highest cigarette smoking rate in the early 1960s...        ...Yet we haven't even reached our highest child and adult obesity rates yet. So look for a big uptick in obesity-related cancer in the coming decades, as we continue to neglect to address the main obesity root causes: inactivity & unhealthy nutrition. We can pray for a miracle cancer cure to emerge in the meantime.  But we can also do something much more concrete and certain, now:  Ramp u

Sorry for another Downer but... The 3rd biannual Physical Activity for Children and Youth, 2018 US Report Card was published recently.  No surprise: the USA received a D- grade for overall child physical activity. One thing I like about these report cards, even though the data are imperfect and the bad news is daunting:  they get media attention.  Both Cronkite News and the local CBS and independent TV affiliate have contacted us about this so far. One of their initial takes: well, at least Arizona is more fit than most other states.  Boy, that is looking hard for a silver-lining in a very dark cloud. This Report Card measures fitness by % of children who are overweight or obese--using BMI: Body Mass Index.  This is not a great approach for measuring fitness. (We all know that kids--and adults--can be fit yet overweight, or unfit though normal weight.)  But BMI is a readily available proxy statistic that is roughly comparable across all states. And the really bad news:  th