You should post this in P&N so members can have at it.
It will be interesting to see how American and it's citizens react to this in the next couple decades.
edit: there's another linked article to mull over as well...
https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/02/health/millennials-diet-exercise/index.html
This is why I have a very strict diet. All the shit you shovel down has a direct affect on how you feel later on in life.
Poisons accumulate in the body and eventually break it down. It's just the way it is unfortunately...
I think is a couple of decades we will start seeing a ton of early deaths. This will inturn push people away from technology, and eating crappy since they don't want to be in the same shoes.
P&N argues over a million things that will ruin this country over the next 100 years; immigration, LGBTQ rights, taxes, socialism, climate change, etc. While there are certainly some of these that are more valid than others, I think it's by far more likely that we're ruined Healthcare/disease. This country is becoming so massively unhealthy and we're essentially doing nothing about it.
Oh absolutely true, I didn't mean it's the actual technology of medicine. It's really a cultural/societal problem of not making healthy lifestyle a priority.. at all. There's also a lot of profit in "unhealthiness." Then add that the cost of an unhealthy life generally shifts to the public sector (us), we've got real problems.This is not as much a health issue at the fundamental level but a societal one. We're unhealthy because that's what being penned up in cages does. People talk about humane animal treatment, "free range" this or that, and yet are given our resources if we sit before a screen and type or other low physical effort tasks. It isn't our medicine or lack thereof which is killing Americans, but our mandated lifestyle. Cultures with siestas, for example, fare better than the chronically sleep deprived. Couple that with manipulation of the human animal with food that is the culinary equivalent to crack, and we have a disaster.
Wanna eat garbage, become morbidly obese and then have diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, etc? Sure! Freedom!
Oh absolutely true, I didn't mean it's the actual technology of medicine. It's really a cultural/societal problem of not making healthy lifestyle a priority.. at all. There's also a lot of profit in "unhealthiness." Then add that the cost of an unhealthy life generally shifts to the public sector (us), we've got real problems.
Essentially, it's too easy to be horribly unhealthy without bearing the full brunt of the repercussions. (not that I'm arguing that one necessarily should, this is an incredibly complex social, economic, and ethical discussion that can't be boiled down to a few sentences)
Wanna eat garbage, become morbidly obese and then have diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, etc? Sure! Freedom! But then that person ends up on Medicare and Medicaid and the taxpayers foot the bill after McDonald's et al made all the profit.
Certainly true. That's part of my suggestion regarding the privatization of profits. Fast food is chemically designed to be addicting, but as you say, not as part of some conspiracy against health - it's just the best way to make a profit. Unfortunately, that profit comes with a side of significant health problems.You bring up a point which is not often given it's due in terms of rational discussions, and it involves "freedom", or more precisely free will and does it exist in any meaningful contextual sense. I think that is far more limited than many might and that obesity, "garbage" and the like are more symptomatic than causative of our problems. You may know that this isn't a conspiracy, but a fact that fast food and adverts are designed to bypass the rational part of the brain and trip the more primitive parts of the brain that we cannot control. McDonald's burgers as an example are designed to trip every addictive neurochemical mechanism possible and it's not a matter of chance but design. For all our pretense at being better than our ancestors, we are not. We are the Neolithic hunter-gatherer designed to live like the people on "Alone" in our only evolutionary mandates involve shelter, food, and sex and always on the verge of famine- always.
I think that obesity, diabetes, strokes, and more are co-morbidities more than anything else whose causal origins are related to brain chemistry that are both coincident and willfully created to a larger subject.
I can as you likely know bring on significant weight gain in most individuals without any dietary changes, increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, insulin resistance and more. All I need to do is create a situation of chronic sleep deprivation. Who today has good sleep hygiene and consistent amounts of it?
As you say it's extremely complex and poorly understood in anything remotely approaching proper context. My potential solutions for understanding are unconventional as I am of the opinion that this is beyond the direct abilities of our unaided biological selves.