Fast food is killing America
Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
151–160 of 188 posts
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#152I’m surprised to see nobody call out alcohol consumption. While this is a few years old, the data should be relevant; alcohol takes years to manifest into full-blown health crises: https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/Surveillance95/CONS1... Additionally, there has been an upswing in youth consumption in the past decade directly. We need to have a public conversation about what we’re doing to ourselves, especially…
>Additionally, there has been an upswing in youth consumption in the past decade directly.
Cite? According to this[1] paper, there was a decline in underage alcohol consumption between 1991 and 2013, but that doesn't quite contradict what you said.
[1] https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/surveillance101/Unde...
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really familiar with the policies enacted towards recovery... How "hands on" was the government in kicking the economy back into gear? Did we do much beyond lowering interest rates? Many smaller manufacturing businesses both depended on selling to and buying from small impacted businesses... self-contained systems that keep money and management local. Restarting those economic ecosystems requires more than ju…
> How "hands on" was the government in kicking the economy back into gear? Did we do much beyond lowering interest rates? If by "we" you mean the U.S. government, it spent about $700 billion to stimulate economic activity and employment.
The government would have spent more, but at the time the pro-austerity crowd was trying to reduce government spending. This left the federal reserve (and internationally other central banks) as the primary economic stimulator, which has it's own set of poor effects (a stimulus package can function as a jobs program, whereas low interest rates serve to increase the capital that the wealthy already own).
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#154Many call to see the relation with the Afghanistan War and its consequences (or payback).
Action = reaction of was it premeditated by the 'elite' as a population regulator as we saw with the cocaine. A way to destroy the more fragile part of the population.
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has there been a net decrease in these programs since 2008? I think the opposite is true.
The GOP has refused to increase spending and has tried to cut it on principle, and in some places has cut it dramatically (e.g., Kansas). Most importantly, the Budget Control Act of 2011 (the "Sequester") was designed to set spending so low that both parties would be forced to compromise on regular-order spending bills in order to fund what was important to them (generally seen as defense for the GOP, domestic welfar…
How is the military being crippled? What non-civilian military programs need more funding and why?
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is more nuance for you: A) Americans need to be more health centric. Half the problem is that a minority of chronic patients account for 50% of the costs. Drive through rural America, fast food is the only option. Grocery shopping at Dollar stores and gas stations. Solving Americas obesity epidemic is step one in fixing US healthcare. B) Big pharma regulations. I like the idea of importing drugs and creating mor…
These are very good and fair points that I was ignoring so far. Personally, to avoid being someone just criticizing but not offering my own ideas, here's my initial recipe at the moment based on what I've learned so far is (subject to change from new information, of course :) ). It actually includes all three: * Government-mandated health insurance coverage at a certain useful minimum level. Insurance companies allow…
>Obesity is a particularly tough one, though. Generally, populations that eat less (and less unhealthy simple-carb-based-stuff) and walk more appear to have less obesity, but politically this isn't a big winner.
The reason people are obese also has to do with many other factors.
Fat food is very, very cheap in the US, especially compared to normal food and greens. one solution to this is to tax fat food and use this tax to lower the tax on healthier foods, thus subsidizing healthy behaviour. This makes healhy food available for the poor strata.
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not just alcohol. Diets heavy on fat and cholesterol seem to only get more popular year after year.
Unless there's been some very recent findings that I missed, everything I've been reading for the last several years has found that fat and cholesterol are not the problems we once thought they were.
> everything I've been reading
Sounds like you only prefer to read stuff that is pro-Keto.
Saturated fat and cholesterol are the cause of many western diseases. Cholesterol-deniers are setting people up to get fatty streaks in their artieries. A low fat/cholesterol diet (especially plant based) is the only one that has been proven to reverse heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Many diets are good for losing weight, but that doesn't make them healthy.
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#158A recent episode of "The Weeds" podcast was all about this [1]. I highly recommend listening to it and the podcast in general. The general thoughts are (especially for those poo-pooing the findings): - The cause is likely a massive increase in drug overdose deaths, whose average age of death is lower than other common causes (>20% year over year increase, mainly opioid-related) [2] - The drop in life expectancy is no…
Also the fact that we now are aware of the opioid problem and are starting to really crack down on over-prescription of pills causing addicts to turn to heroin or fentanyl has to be a big factor. What percent actually OD on pills?
This is something also covered in the podcast. Instead of an over-prescription problem you now have a heroin/fentanyl problem which was expected but assumed to be temporary without prescription pills as an introduction to these drugs. It doesn't look like solving the over-prescription problem is helping at all though.
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
The underlying problem is that college is the wrong thing. College focuses on capital-E “Education.” Book learning, “big ideas,” and “learning to think.” What we need is training—teaching people the concrete skills they need for a job. That’s true even in majors that are ostensibly directed to producing professionals. Engineering school often focuses too much on producing PhD candidates rather than practicing enginee…
> The underlying problem is that college is the wrong thing. College focuses on capital-E “Education.” Book learning, “big ideas,” and “learning to think.” What we need is training—teaching people the concrete skills they need for a job. Can you back this up? It's a big statement. Even if it's commonplace, I don't think it's well thought through. Education is for far more than jobs: People have to be citizens, commun…
> Education is for far more than jobs: People have to be citizens, community members, parents, individuals, and more - they need to be able to understand and reason critically about the world.
It is incredibly condescending and shortsighted of you to say that those of us who did not attend college are not capable of participating in, or even excelling at those roles in society.
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Has democracy failed? An outsider was elected even though he was running against establishment candidates with huge money backing them. I say democracy won.
First, I'm not sure that's a good metric to measure the success of democracy. Second, Trump lost the popular vote.
To be fair, he wasn’t campaigning to win the popular vote - doing so would look entirely different from a traditional Presidential campaign. To win the popular vote a Republican candidate would spend a lot more time and money in high-population, heavily Democrat states; these states such as California and New York are largely ignored today as they are ‘locked up’.