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.

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

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

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It’s Come To This for Many of Our Teens: Radical Surgery and/or a Lifetime of Pharmaceuticals

The American Academy of Pediatrics just came out in favor of powerful prescription drugs (which must be taken lifelong to avoid weight regain & chronic disease) for adolescents--and potentially for pre-teens (ages 8-11)--with moderate to severe obesity. Bari atric surgery (permanently reengineering kids’ gastrointestinal systems) should also be considered for adolescents with severe obesity . (The Academy also recommends "nutrition support, physical activity, and behavioral therapy"--but as with so many other areas of US chronic disease management, we can see where default treatments are headed: drugs & surgical procedures.) Such radical treatment recommendations created the usual (and temporary and ineffectual) tsunami of news & social media shock and indignation. The decades-long performative reaction to the increasingly bad news on dangerous levels of early obesity–and now 1 in 3 teens with prediabetes, across ethnicities & income levels–is itself sicken...

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