Our W.E. Op-ed with Heritage: A COVID-19 vaccine won't save us, but improving our health can

My op-ed with Lt. Gen. Tom Spoehr (Ret.) at The Heritage Foundation was just published! There is clear potential for nonpartisan approaches to child health & wellness. We can do a much better job of developing healthy habits K-12, so that Americans have a much greater chance of a healthy life!: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/a-covid-19-vaccine-wont-save-us-but-improving-our-health-can

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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...

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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