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

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...

Urban food myth #1: it costs more to eat healthy than to eat fast food

I get so tired of hearing this: "It costs less to buy a burger from McDonald's that to eat healthy food from the supermarket." "Low-income families just buy processed food, they don't cook their own food anymore." That always sounded questionable. Here is a study showing in great detail that fast food is much more expensive than healthy food bought at the supermarket . Also, it turns out that the vast majority of meals eaten by low-income families are prepared at home: Blisard N, Stewart H. How low-income households allocate their food budget relative to the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan. Economic research report, United States. Washington, DC: Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 2006;20. What is true is that buying healthy vs. unhealthy foods can cost $1.50/person/day more, at retail prices. However, when health cost consequences are factored in, unhealthy foods cost twice as much .

Health "benefits"?: Oh well...

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-...

Healthy Future US Blog

Search This Blog