Skip to main content

Name Your Poison: Unhealthy Nutrition or COVID-19?

Compare the number of preventable deaths each year from chronic disease caused by unhealthy nutrition & inactivity to the fraction of that mortality from COVID-19.  

One of the reasons we have invested so much attention & money on COVID-19, in contrast with the more perennially dangerous unhealthy nutrition & inactivity, is that everyone including those with power are at-risk of getting infected by the virus.  

Since inactivity & unhealthy nutrition affect primarily non-white & lower-income folks with no power, they all get ignored.  As soon as COVID-19 vaccines hit, the powers-that-be will start trying to ignore disparities again--though hopefully the pandemic has at least raised consciousness enough to make that willful ignorance more fragile than in the past.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is it a “Miracle Drug”?...if it Costs a Fortune and Creates Lifelong Dependency...&...Saggy Faces!?

[It’s been a while since our last blog post.  A lot has happened since– including some “miracles” ! So we’re going to do two posts in a row…] Normally we should all be happy about miracle drugs... shouldn't we ? Yes, there is lots of upside from taking semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy), tirzepatide (Montjaro)--and upcoming new, even-more-miraculous drugs TBD:  losing huge amounts of weight quickly, a much lower risk of diabetes–and probably less heart disease and other chronic conditions as well.  But what if the “miracle” requires:   $200-300/week, with a lifetime cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars…  a drug that you can never quit…because if you stop taking it, you gain back all the weight it helped you lose–not to mention the chronic diseases which the drugs kept at bay… and it leaves your face (and the rest of your skin?) sagging …    (plus, it’s so new at such high dosages– who knows what happens after years of use…? ) No doubt, in spit...

Smoking out the pessimism on changing health habits: adult smoking is down 2/3 !!

Only 14% of US adults smoke now --compared to 42% just over 50 years ago. That's a 2/3 decline. Yet many of us think that we can't change Americans' unhealthy activity & nutrition habits. Why has smoking gone down so dramatically, while obesity & diabetes keep going up?  Well, we actually seriously tried, as a society & a political system, to reduce smoking.  We have not seriously tried to reverse obesity & diabetes. How did we reduce smoking so much?  Here is my grading of how poorly we are doing, at using strategies that worked against smoking--to fight inactivity & unhealthy nutrition: - Broad & profound awareness of seriousness of problem  (D) - Strong physical & health education programs in schools  (D) - Hard-hitting, pervasive public information campaigns  (F) - Very strong government health warnings  (D) - Large insurance premium discounts for healthy behavior  (D) - Cost-effective behavior cessati...

Both/And: Personal & School & Social Responsibility for Health

Many people are promoting a false dichotomy for who/what to “blame” for decades of pervasive inactivity & unhealthy nutrition--the key preventable factors which have led to the majority of adults developing chronic disease. Some believe that people with preventable chronic diseases made a series of unhealthy choices for decades, for which they need to accept personal responsibility for the consequences. On the other side, a growing number of policymakers focus on the “social determinants of health.”  In other words, there are many things beyond your control, which impact what you eat & drink and how active you are.  This includes factors such as your family, neighborhood, school, employer, transportation, public safety, housing, community layout, etc. etc.  It’s those external social factors which determine your health destiny.   Actually, the personal and social are inextricably connected--not opposite ends of the spectrum.  Let’s consider the role...