I read the article, but on re-read, I gave up after the first few paragraphs of lazy journalism.
> gun violence,
no reference link
> drug overdoses
Reasonable reference link although the data ends at 2020.
> auto accidents
Links to an X post of IHME chart. Why not just link to the original IHME data? Data stops at 2019.
> America’s unusually short lifespans
The referenced data is "Child and Infant Mortality", and again till 2020.
> U.S. government reported that drug-overdose deaths fell 3 percent from 2022 to 2023.
Following the link to the data, each single state where there was significant drop is * as "*Underreported due to incomplete data." For example, North Carolina drug OD "dropped" 49.34% yoy. Not only that the data source has it on the top in large, framed box "Some states currently have longer than usual delays in reporting drug overdose deaths."
I really want this to be true, but after this, I am not convinced.
I think he's questioning whether those factors changed, not whether those factors contribute to deaths. The claim of the article after all, is that life expectancy has risen.
In order to judge the merits of the argument it is helpful to understand why certain points are made so journalists will usually provide some citation which justifies their claims. It doesn’t help the argument to provide bad references, let alone to not bother with a reference.
If you want to see if America is getting healthier, look at any large insurance firm's actuaries on current rates of mortality. They are predicting fairly unusual patterns suggesting American's are becoming unnaturally sick and dying at a higher rate than before 2020.
These kind of articles are just trying to undermine the new adminstration's attempts to correct for this.
If you want to see if America is getting healthier, look at any large insurance firm's actuaries on current rates of mortality. They are predicting fairly unusual patterns suggesting American's are becoming unnaturally sick and dying at a higher rate than before 2020.
These kind of articles are just trying to undermine the new administrations attempts to correct for this.
The obesity decline is obviously related to the widespread use of GLP-1 drugs. The article mentions this halfway down but pretends that it’s still a big mystery.
Obesity and lifespan are favorite topics of people lamenting America as a whole but articles like these one always avoid the elephant in the room: Obesity and lifespan are very region-specific in the United States. If you live in the south you’ll have access to some great food, but the average lifespan is substantially lower.
The decline in drug deaths could be related to a growing wariness over fentanyl. Fentanyl was popular for a while with opioid seekers who wanted the cheapest option, but many of them are sadly dying off and new drug users know better to avoid it. Most of the news reports are about accidental fentanyl contamination, but the scary reality is that fentanyl was being actively sought out by many opioid seekers.
Some of the other stats feel like a return to normalcy after the COVID strange times, which the article mentions.
> The obesity decline is obviously related to the widespread use of GLP-1 drugs.
All I have to offer is anecdotes, but as someone who is currently on a GLP-1 RA, when I've talked about my experience it seems like most people are totally unaware of them other than the fact that they exist. It's possible people are embarrassed to admit they're using GLP-1 RAs.
Combined with the challenge of getting insurance to cover this, it seems like most people who could benefit from these drugs are not using them. I think there's a contribution for sure, but I also see in my own life people who would previously have gotten a cheeseburger when eating out choosing a salad.
You only need a small number of people taking GLP-1 drugs to see the overall obesity rate go down.
As far as drugs go, GLP-1 drugs are extremely popular for how young they are. As the article mentions, 1 in 8 people have been prescribed them at some point. Regardless of what you’ve heard personally, that’s a huge number of people! Definitely enough to start showing up as a couple points reduction in obesity rate.
1 in 8! That's crazy. That's way more than enough people to see a reduction in the rate.
I have "good" insurance that is self-funded by my employer, so no actual financial interest for the insurance company to deny claims, and it's still a battle each and every month to get it covered, while I have no problems with advanced imaging for a chronic health issue.
> I have "good" insurance that is self-funded by my employer, so no actual financial interest for the insurance company to deny claims
The common way to structure self-insured plans lets the employer and insurer split any leftover money at the end of the year.
So both your insurer and your employer have incentive to deny claims.
That said, GLP-1 drugs are far more expensive in the US than anywhere else, so it’s amazing that we get them covered so often. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why they’re so expensive. If they weren’t covered at all for obesity, their market price would drop substantially. It’s a system full of weird incentives.
They work and they are indeed expensive. I have a feeling in the coming years the popularity of GLP-1 style drugs is going to really skew the income:lifespan ratios even further.
I was going to suggest the same thing. I'm on Monujaro, and it has really altered my relationship to food. My cravings have gone way down, and I can stop eating them. For example, I had an American-size sandwich at a restaurant the other day, and when I got halfway through it, I realized they didn't need to eat the rest of it, so I took it home.
These drugs are truly superb and I hope they find a way to deal with the cases of blindness it seems to trigger.
As I start to work with more genz folks, it is extremely pervasive that gym culture and health consciousness are much more core to their common zeitgeist than millennials. I imagine the same conditions core to their childhood and adolescence is also driving change in their parents and the rest of society.
Growing up natively with social media seems like a very reasonable correlation for me. Your life and habits are always under a lens, self consciousness or conscientiousness make sense.
Gen Z also views alcohol very differently, apparently. Without looking at collected data it's hard to say which generation is leading this charge (I suspect Gen Z and Gen Alpha), but I feel like an *alcohol* sober lifestyle is much more common these days.
I'm not on TikTok and generally try to avoid a lot of social media, so the uptick in gym rat lifestyle is not something I've been aware of. Certainly a good thing though and it's nice to see a whole generation not submitting themselves to permanently being on weightloss hormones or chronically obese. I'm in my mid-30s and folks in my social circle are either fit with quality fitness interlaced into their weeks or above average in weight. There's rarely an outlier from those two groups.
Even if this is true, surely this wouldn't show up in the statistics until decades later? Going to the gym has little effect of whether you make it to 40 or 50, but it might make a difference between 80 and 90, but if all the gym going population are in their 20s today, that's not going to cause the statistics to shift.
This is absolutely true on both counts. For as much as social media is decried for negative effects on mental health and IRL socialization, healthy lifestyle & fitness inspos are absolutely having an impact. The nice thing about this is that it translates in obvious ways to IRL lifestyle mods, which when they show positive effects (better sleep, better skin, improved fitness, etc) become self-reinforcing habits. Among other things, alcohol consumption is way lower in young people than older generations, and although other recreational drug use is still "a thing", overall knowledge about the effects & impacts of recreational drugs is far more pervasive than in the past (as a young Gen-Xer myself, the prevailing mentality in the late80s-early90s was "drugs make fun times more fun" and that was about it).
I expect lots of formal study of these phenomena in coming years. As a parent of kids 7, 13, and 16 who spends a fair bit of time around school campuses & youth sports teams, for all the whining and complaining adults do about young people, my experience is that today's youth are by far the most empathetic, compassionate and best adjusted yet. They're going to be ok (provided we can afford to educate them and then hire them into the working world).
Genuine question: in your experience, does this increased focus on image create proportionate negativity in the form of e.g. increased peer comparison, superlatives (i.e. "I am/am not better/smarter/better looking than my peers") than your generation?
The fitness phenomenon is interesting to watch. My neighbor's older high school age children will be looking for something to do and they go to the gym.
When I was in high school ... nobody went to the gym. There weren't many gyms around, now there are a lot.
I do worry though that it might be cost prohibitive or even just limited to some social groups.
> I do worry though that it might be cost prohibitive
Modern gyms can be surprisingly cheap.
Gone are the days of the 1980s when the only option was $$$ for a 'health club' with squash courts and swimming pools, stuck in a year-long contract whether you went or not.
There has been a rise in 'low cost gyms' which are less of a glamorous club, and more of a warehouse with a load of free weights, treadmills and stationary bikes. Often there's barely an employee in sight. In a lot of places $25/month can get you 24-hour access - with no joining fees, and you can cancel whenever you like.
Of course it's still not as cheap as sports like running. But just because someone goes to the gym, doesn't mean they're paying $250/month.
On the other hand, a lot of people played pickup basketball, went running, got exercise in countless other ways, etc. Even if gyms are more popular, I would need to be convinced that those (and fitness trackers, etc.) actually correlate to better fitness and health levels overall.
High schools have gyms. Hell even my high school had a pretty decent weight room. Also don't forget that parents bought a ton of at-home exercise equipment during Covid, so the teenagers probably tried it out too.
This is so true. I noticed only last year how many young kids go to my gym. They aren't skimping on it either. They do all the core exercises, they don't skip leg day, they help each other push more on the bench, etc. I think it'll build a certain form of discipline and character: there are certain things in life which don't have shortcuts. A gym is a great equalizer in many aspects, because you need little to no money for a good gym with good equipment. The most important equipment is a bunch of free weights, and rich or poor, results will need more or less the same amount of work. It's a place which welcomes everyone, and where hard and consistent work is rewarded.
Lifting has definitely played a changing role in my life. As a kid it definitely did instill the idea of working for results. It was extremely rewarding to see that when I worked out consistently and with a plan, I was stronger than my friends who went inconsistently or with poorly planned workouts. As an adult now it's more therapeutic - so much of my day is ambiguous, out of my control, or searching for how to apply my leverage instead of actually just applying my leverage. So it's very nice to have an hour of my day where I decide what I am working towards, and be able to hit clear goals largely by putting in blind effort.
How much did overdose deaths actually increase during COVID? My first inclination is it's most likely to be the effects of curtailing the firehose of opiate pain medication prescription that started a few years earlier. It makes sense that that would have a long tail effect as the number of new addicts being created was decreased.
That's my point, the effects of that on overdose deaths would take a while to happen. it's not like everyone who gets prescribed opioids immediately gets hooked and ODs and even after they're cut off they don't immediately go and OD on heroin or other illegally sourced opioids. There's a built in time lag between the reduction in prescriptions and the OD deaths they caused, measured in years in a lot of cases.
They mention the pandemic and lockdowns a few other times in the article.
The thing is that's really something that could go in either direction. Has a lethal virus, which is still circulating widely, made deaths go up? Has the lockdown decreased driving, making road deaths fall? Has the strain on the healthcare system meant things like cancers went undiagnosed, making deaths go up? Has the fact the oldest and least healthy people died in the pandemic made post-pandemic deaths go down? Did the boredom of lockdowns drive more people to use hard drugs, making deaths go up? Did the pandemic-triggered rise in remote working let people convert their commute time into exercise time, making deaths go down? Did the pandemic, and seeing other people's response to it, lead to a rise in selfish behaviour like bad driving, making deaths go up? Did work-from-home replace unhealthy on-the-go meals with healthy home-cooked food, reducing obesity and making deaths go down?
It is endlessly and depressingly fascinating to me that we've had so much anti-drug propaganda shoved down us for so long that depicts addicts as monstrous criminals that seemingly as a society we're just unable to reckon with the fact that the best cure for drug addiction is just... being around other people. Not being isolated by circumstances, odd work hours, what have you. Just having a social life will not only keep you addiction-free but also enables you to use the same substances recreationally in a healthy way (sometimes, anyway, it's not bulletproof but it definitely helps).
> the best cure for drug addiction is just... being around other people. Not being isolated by circumstances, odd work hours, what have you.
Counterpoint: Most of the people I know who picked up drug addictions (all who have received treatment and currently recovered) picked them up from social situations. They encountered groups where drug use was their common weekend activity and you either joined them or you weren’t included.
Being in between jobs or having a job with low demands was also an enabler of drug addiction. Idle hands and all that.
> Just having a social life will not only keep you addiction-free but also enables you to use the same substances recreationally in a healthy way
This generalization doesn’t hold at all. I haven’t heard of any addicts who became more moderate of their use of hard drugs when surrounded by other users of those hard drugs. The correlation goes the other way. Being around other users both enables and encourages more drug use.
You might be over-reaching with your last paragraph.
There are plenty of people who drink alcohol around other alcohol-users and the social dynamic limits how much they drink (don't want to appear foolish or out of control around friends or coworkers, match number of drinks to the people they're with, etc).
There are also plenty of examples of people using "party drugs" on weekends socially and that those same friends are the first ones to voice concern if a person in the group starts using the drugs more often or in excess.
In many cases, it's when people switch from using drugs with friends to using them alone that is the turning point to addiction and problematic usage.
> In September, the U.S. government announced that the adult-obesity rate had declined in its most recent count, which ended in August 2023.
The word "announced" is a link to this [1]. I'm failing to see in that where the rate has declined. According to the "key findings" section of that document,
> From 2013–2014 through August 2021–August 2023, the age-adjusted prevalence of obesity did not change significantly, while severe obesity prevalence increased from 7.7% to 9.7%.
Later it adds,
> Changes in the prevalence of obesity and severe obesity between the two most recent survey cycles, 2017–March 2020 and August 2021–August 2023, were not significant.
Headlines are rarely about the article and more about getting you to read the article. People think of a headline as a summary but in reality it’s best looked upon as the most striking line in an article.
The CDC considers gun deaths a health problem. They have a National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. They'd like to study it, but have been specifically prevented from doing so (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment). That has expired but they are rarely allocated money to study gun violence.
Very interesting read. It seems ok to study it but the results shouldn’t induce gun control advocacy. That’s crazy !! A dictator wouldn’t do better than that congress.
> In a 2012 op-ed, Dickey and Rosenberg argued that the CDC should be able to research gun violence. Dickey has said that he regrets his role in stopping the CDC from researching gun violence, saying he simply didn't want to "let any of those dollars go to gun control advocacy."
People who have not been in traffic accidents tend to be healthier. The woke liberal media might be too afraid to admit that but it’s true.
Which is why I as your representative will make jaywalking a felony crime. Leave our poor cars alone! They’re just commuting to work as good, honest, Christian, hard-working hunks of metal.
I can't imagine you'll find a single reason for this. There was an study this week about the decrease in drug and alcohol use amongst young people. Which I'm sure is just one of many contributing factors.
Maybe that was covered in the article, but it's paywalled so I couldn't read passed the free intro paragraphs. And with such a click-baity title, I wouldn't want to anyways.
the U.S. is rightly considered a “rich death trap” for its young and middle-aged citizens...
Our purchasing power is declining, vis a vis wages not keeping up with inflation and in some cases falling [0]. It follows that if we aren't as rich as we used to be, we're falling into less of a "rich death trap".
Is there some Simpsons paradox/composition effect thing going on here, or something with PPP vs. real wages? For full-time employees, real wages are up[0][1], especially for the bottom quartile[2]. Overall median income appears to be down from 2019[3][4].
That's a terrible article. Most of the numbers[1] are "last five years", which is a huge cherry pick right around the pandemic. It's true that there was an savings and inflation burst 2021-2023! But drawing your box around it and declaring "things are getting worse" instead of looking at the trend in both directions is just bad science.
It's been going steadily upward since 2011, and is currently, except
for the 2020-22 correction the article is cherry picking.
[1] Also the headline isn't an aggregate number measuring people, it's citing "97% of professions". Wat? What does that even mean? Is there a formal list out there of all the "professions" such that you can count them all? Clearly there is not, so that number become non-falsifiable.
I read the article, but on re-read, I gave up after the first few paragraphs of lazy journalism.
> gun violence,
no reference link
> drug overdoses
Reasonable reference link although the data ends at 2020.
> auto accidents
Links to an X post of IHME chart. Why not just link to the original IHME data? Data stops at 2019.
> America’s unusually short lifespans
The referenced data is "Child and Infant Mortality", and again till 2020.
> U.S. government reported that drug-overdose deaths fell 3 percent from 2022 to 2023.
Following the link to the data, each single state where there was significant drop is * as "*Underreported due to incomplete data." For example, North Carolina drug OD "dropped" 49.34% yoy. Not only that the data source has it on the top in large, framed box "Some states currently have longer than usual delays in reporting drug overdose deaths."
I really want this to be true, but after this, I am not convinced.
Do you really need a reference on gun violence?
I think he's questioning whether those factors changed, not whether those factors contribute to deaths. The claim of the article after all, is that life expectancy has risen.
Yes. The overwhelming majority of gun violence are suicides, so real data is a great proxy for things that are harder to track.
In order to judge the merits of the argument it is helpful to understand why certain points are made so journalists will usually provide some citation which justifies their claims. It doesn’t help the argument to provide bad references, let alone to not bother with a reference.
If you want to see if America is getting healthier, look at any large insurance firm's actuaries on current rates of mortality. They are predicting fairly unusual patterns suggesting American's are becoming unnaturally sick and dying at a higher rate than before 2020. These kind of articles are just trying to undermine the new adminstration's attempts to correct for this.
If you want to see if America is getting healthier, look at any large insurance firm's actuaries on current rates of mortality. They are predicting fairly unusual patterns suggesting American's are becoming unnaturally sick and dying at a higher rate than before 2020. These kind of articles are just trying to undermine the new administrations attempts to correct for this.
The obesity decline is obviously related to the widespread use of GLP-1 drugs. The article mentions this halfway down but pretends that it’s still a big mystery.
Obesity and lifespan are favorite topics of people lamenting America as a whole but articles like these one always avoid the elephant in the room: Obesity and lifespan are very region-specific in the United States. If you live in the south you’ll have access to some great food, but the average lifespan is substantially lower.
The decline in drug deaths could be related to a growing wariness over fentanyl. Fentanyl was popular for a while with opioid seekers who wanted the cheapest option, but many of them are sadly dying off and new drug users know better to avoid it. Most of the news reports are about accidental fentanyl contamination, but the scary reality is that fentanyl was being actively sought out by many opioid seekers.
Some of the other stats feel like a return to normalcy after the COVID strange times, which the article mentions.
> The obesity decline is obviously related to the widespread use of GLP-1 drugs.
All I have to offer is anecdotes, but as someone who is currently on a GLP-1 RA, when I've talked about my experience it seems like most people are totally unaware of them other than the fact that they exist. It's possible people are embarrassed to admit they're using GLP-1 RAs.
Combined with the challenge of getting insurance to cover this, it seems like most people who could benefit from these drugs are not using them. I think there's a contribution for sure, but I also see in my own life people who would previously have gotten a cheeseburger when eating out choosing a salad.
You only need a small number of people taking GLP-1 drugs to see the overall obesity rate go down.
As far as drugs go, GLP-1 drugs are extremely popular for how young they are. As the article mentions, 1 in 8 people have been prescribed them at some point. Regardless of what you’ve heard personally, that’s a huge number of people! Definitely enough to start showing up as a couple points reduction in obesity rate.
1 in 8! That's crazy. That's way more than enough people to see a reduction in the rate.
I have "good" insurance that is self-funded by my employer, so no actual financial interest for the insurance company to deny claims, and it's still a battle each and every month to get it covered, while I have no problems with advanced imaging for a chronic health issue.
> I have "good" insurance that is self-funded by my employer, so no actual financial interest for the insurance company to deny claims
The common way to structure self-insured plans lets the employer and insurer split any leftover money at the end of the year.
So both your insurer and your employer have incentive to deny claims.
That said, GLP-1 drugs are far more expensive in the US than anywhere else, so it’s amazing that we get them covered so often. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why they’re so expensive. If they weren’t covered at all for obesity, their market price would drop substantially. It’s a system full of weird incentives.
Going down a bit is still a far cry from making a big dent in the overall obesity rate , which is still very high. More needs to be done.
They work and they are indeed expensive. I have a feeling in the coming years the popularity of GLP-1 style drugs is going to really skew the income:lifespan ratios even further.
To be honest, this is the first time I've even heard of them.
I was going to suggest the same thing. I'm on Monujaro, and it has really altered my relationship to food. My cravings have gone way down, and I can stop eating them. For example, I had an American-size sandwich at a restaurant the other day, and when I got halfway through it, I realized they didn't need to eat the rest of it, so I took it home.
These drugs are truly superb and I hope they find a way to deal with the cases of blindness it seems to trigger.
How much less are you eating overall on a daily basis compared to before?
As I start to work with more genz folks, it is extremely pervasive that gym culture and health consciousness are much more core to their common zeitgeist than millennials. I imagine the same conditions core to their childhood and adolescence is also driving change in their parents and the rest of society.
Growing up natively with social media seems like a very reasonable correlation for me. Your life and habits are always under a lens, self consciousness or conscientiousness make sense.
Gen Z also views alcohol very differently, apparently. Without looking at collected data it's hard to say which generation is leading this charge (I suspect Gen Z and Gen Alpha), but I feel like an *alcohol* sober lifestyle is much more common these days.
I'm not on TikTok and generally try to avoid a lot of social media, so the uptick in gym rat lifestyle is not something I've been aware of. Certainly a good thing though and it's nice to see a whole generation not submitting themselves to permanently being on weightloss hormones or chronically obese. I'm in my mid-30s and folks in my social circle are either fit with quality fitness interlaced into their weeks or above average in weight. There's rarely an outlier from those two groups.
Even if this is true, surely this wouldn't show up in the statistics until decades later? Going to the gym has little effect of whether you make it to 40 or 50, but it might make a difference between 80 and 90, but if all the gym going population are in their 20s today, that's not going to cause the statistics to shift.
If the 20-somethings today are substantially healthier than the 20-somethings 10 years ago, then quality statistics _should_ capture the effect.
This is absolutely true on both counts. For as much as social media is decried for negative effects on mental health and IRL socialization, healthy lifestyle & fitness inspos are absolutely having an impact. The nice thing about this is that it translates in obvious ways to IRL lifestyle mods, which when they show positive effects (better sleep, better skin, improved fitness, etc) become self-reinforcing habits. Among other things, alcohol consumption is way lower in young people than older generations, and although other recreational drug use is still "a thing", overall knowledge about the effects & impacts of recreational drugs is far more pervasive than in the past (as a young Gen-Xer myself, the prevailing mentality in the late80s-early90s was "drugs make fun times more fun" and that was about it).
I expect lots of formal study of these phenomena in coming years. As a parent of kids 7, 13, and 16 who spends a fair bit of time around school campuses & youth sports teams, for all the whining and complaining adults do about young people, my experience is that today's youth are by far the most empathetic, compassionate and best adjusted yet. They're going to be ok (provided we can afford to educate them and then hire them into the working world).
Genuine question: in your experience, does this increased focus on image create proportionate negativity in the form of e.g. increased peer comparison, superlatives (i.e. "I am/am not better/smarter/better looking than my peers") than your generation?
The fitness phenomenon is interesting to watch. My neighbor's older high school age children will be looking for something to do and they go to the gym.
When I was in high school ... nobody went to the gym. There weren't many gyms around, now there are a lot.
I do worry though that it might be cost prohibitive or even just limited to some social groups.
> I do worry though that it might be cost prohibitive
Modern gyms can be surprisingly cheap.
Gone are the days of the 1980s when the only option was $$$ for a 'health club' with squash courts and swimming pools, stuck in a year-long contract whether you went or not.
There has been a rise in 'low cost gyms' which are less of a glamorous club, and more of a warehouse with a load of free weights, treadmills and stationary bikes. Often there's barely an employee in sight. In a lot of places $25/month can get you 24-hour access - with no joining fees, and you can cancel whenever you like.
Of course it's still not as cheap as sports like running. But just because someone goes to the gym, doesn't mean they're paying $250/month.
On the other hand, a lot of people played pickup basketball, went running, got exercise in countless other ways, etc. Even if gyms are more popular, I would need to be convinced that those (and fitness trackers, etc.) actually correlate to better fitness and health levels overall.
High schools have gyms. Hell even my high school had a pretty decent weight room. Also don't forget that parents bought a ton of at-home exercise equipment during Covid, so the teenagers probably tried it out too.
This is so true. I noticed only last year how many young kids go to my gym. They aren't skimping on it either. They do all the core exercises, they don't skip leg day, they help each other push more on the bench, etc. I think it'll build a certain form of discipline and character: there are certain things in life which don't have shortcuts. A gym is a great equalizer in many aspects, because you need little to no money for a good gym with good equipment. The most important equipment is a bunch of free weights, and rich or poor, results will need more or less the same amount of work. It's a place which welcomes everyone, and where hard and consistent work is rewarded.
Reminds me of this (slightly melodramatic) article: https://www.oldtimestrongman.com/articles/the-iron-by-henry-...
Lifting has definitely played a changing role in my life. As a kid it definitely did instill the idea of working for results. It was extremely rewarding to see that when I worked out consistently and with a plan, I was stronger than my friends who went inconsistently or with poorly planned workouts. As an adult now it's more therapeutic - so much of my day is ambiguous, out of my control, or searching for how to apply my leverage instead of actually just applying my leverage. So it's very nice to have an hour of my day where I decide what I am working towards, and be able to hit clear goals largely by putting in blind effort.
This just sounds like the end of covid era stats? traffic was weird during lockdowns, isolation might have contributed to drug cases, etc.
for obesity ozempic availability has gotten pretty good and might cut into the margins?
It’s probably because I started going to the gym last week
sghiassy is so fat that one week in the gym affects the national average
You're literally saving lives here, guess you can't quit!
Hey, congrats!
> Take, for example, the decrease in overdose deaths, which might be the most surprising news of the bunch.
(+ several paragraphs with theories as to why)
This is the least surprising to me. The drop coincides with the end of lockdowns, which they don't propose as a possibility.
How much did overdose deaths actually increase during COVID? My first inclination is it's most likely to be the effects of curtailing the firehose of opiate pain medication prescription that started a few years earlier. It makes sense that that would have a long tail effect as the number of new addicts being created was decreased.
The clampdown on opioid prescribing started long before COVID.
That's my point, the effects of that on overdose deaths would take a while to happen. it's not like everyone who gets prescribed opioids immediately gets hooked and ODs and even after they're cut off they don't immediately go and OD on heroin or other illegally sourced opioids. There's a built in time lag between the reduction in prescriptions and the OD deaths they caused, measured in years in a lot of cases.
They mention the pandemic and lockdowns a few other times in the article.
The thing is that's really something that could go in either direction. Has a lethal virus, which is still circulating widely, made deaths go up? Has the lockdown decreased driving, making road deaths fall? Has the strain on the healthcare system meant things like cancers went undiagnosed, making deaths go up? Has the fact the oldest and least healthy people died in the pandemic made post-pandemic deaths go down? Did the boredom of lockdowns drive more people to use hard drugs, making deaths go up? Did the pandemic-triggered rise in remote working let people convert their commute time into exercise time, making deaths go down? Did the pandemic, and seeing other people's response to it, lead to a rise in selfish behaviour like bad driving, making deaths go up? Did work-from-home replace unhealthy on-the-go meals with healthy home-cooked food, reducing obesity and making deaths go down?
> lethal virus
cool it there Mr. Winter Of Death
Even if it's a bad flu for most people, if it picks off all the old people, that's definitely going to show up in the life expectancy statistics.
It is endlessly and depressingly fascinating to me that we've had so much anti-drug propaganda shoved down us for so long that depicts addicts as monstrous criminals that seemingly as a society we're just unable to reckon with the fact that the best cure for drug addiction is just... being around other people. Not being isolated by circumstances, odd work hours, what have you. Just having a social life will not only keep you addiction-free but also enables you to use the same substances recreationally in a healthy way (sometimes, anyway, it's not bulletproof but it definitely helps).
> the best cure for drug addiction is just... being around other people. Not being isolated by circumstances, odd work hours, what have you.
Counterpoint: Most of the people I know who picked up drug addictions (all who have received treatment and currently recovered) picked them up from social situations. They encountered groups where drug use was their common weekend activity and you either joined them or you weren’t included.
Being in between jobs or having a job with low demands was also an enabler of drug addiction. Idle hands and all that.
> Just having a social life will not only keep you addiction-free but also enables you to use the same substances recreationally in a healthy way
This generalization doesn’t hold at all. I haven’t heard of any addicts who became more moderate of their use of hard drugs when surrounded by other users of those hard drugs. The correlation goes the other way. Being around other users both enables and encourages more drug use.
You might be over-reaching with your last paragraph.
There are plenty of people who drink alcohol around other alcohol-users and the social dynamic limits how much they drink (don't want to appear foolish or out of control around friends or coworkers, match number of drinks to the people they're with, etc).
There are also plenty of examples of people using "party drugs" on weekends socially and that those same friends are the first ones to voice concern if a person in the group starts using the drugs more often or in excess.
In many cases, it's when people switch from using drugs with friends to using them alone that is the turning point to addiction and problematic usage.
Seems obvious that if said social life is mostly with people who mostly just do drugs then no change will happen.
[dead]
https://archive.is/9SXR4
It wasn't loading at all for me.
https://archive.ph/L1y3R loaded but very slowly.
> In September, the U.S. government announced that the adult-obesity rate had declined in its most recent count, which ended in August 2023.
The word "announced" is a link to this [1]. I'm failing to see in that where the rate has declined. According to the "key findings" section of that document,
> From 2013–2014 through August 2021–August 2023, the age-adjusted prevalence of obesity did not change significantly, while severe obesity prevalence increased from 7.7% to 9.7%.
Later it adds,
> Changes in the prevalence of obesity and severe obesity between the two most recent survey cycles, 2017–March 2020 and August 2021–August 2023, were not significant.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db508.htm
Weird to open an article about health with traffic accident statistics.
It’s not an article solely about health.
Headlines are rarely about the article and more about getting you to read the article. People think of a headline as a summary but in reality it’s best looked upon as the most striking line in an article.
They cite it within the « big picture » lifespan in the US, as an introduction. They also cite gun death in that picture.
Health and lifespan are very probably very correlated in their readers interests.
The CDC considers gun deaths a health problem. They have a National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. They'd like to study it, but have been specifically prevented from doing so (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment). That has expired but they are rarely allocated money to study gun violence.
Very interesting read. It seems ok to study it but the results shouldn’t induce gun control advocacy. That’s crazy !! A dictator wouldn’t do better than that congress.
> In a 2012 op-ed, Dickey and Rosenberg argued that the CDC should be able to research gun violence. Dickey has said that he regrets his role in stopping the CDC from researching gun violence, saying he simply didn't want to "let any of those dollars go to gun control advocacy."
Getting hit by a car is bad for your health.
People who have not been in traffic accidents tend to be healthier. The woke liberal media might be too afraid to admit that but it’s true.
Which is why I as your representative will make jaywalking a felony crime. Leave our poor cars alone! They’re just commuting to work as good, honest, Christian, hard-working hunks of metal.
It seems that very little of that has anything to do with health.
It also seems like the declines are all from the recent COVID induced surges. Have we declined in any of those metrics from 2019 levels?
The only one really healthy related is obesity, likely from the combination of GLP-1 and COVID killing obese people.
Every decade there is a weight loss miracle cure and everytime we see an outbreak of the side effects a few years later.
So it's hard pressed to call a medication induced decline in obesity "healthy".
Anecdotally the few people I know that have experienced significant weight loss from Ozempic look anything but healthy.
Covid stats skewed everything. This article isn't very rigorous.
This. Mortality displacement isn’t a new phenomenon.
I hope the reason is not that so many persons died prematurely that the natural rate of illness is not sufficient to replacer them in the statistics.
I can't imagine you'll find a single reason for this. There was an study this week about the decrease in drug and alcohol use amongst young people. Which I'm sure is just one of many contributing factors.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/12/the-kids-are-maybe-al...
Maybe that was covered in the article, but it's paywalled so I couldn't read passed the free intro paragraphs. And with such a click-baity title, I wouldn't want to anyways.
"Also in September, FBI analysis confirmed a double-digit decline in the national murder rate."
Was this before or after they added in all the murders that weren't reported to the FBI?
https://crimeresearch.org/2024/04/how-reliable-are-the-fbis-...
Well... congratulations?
It's almost certainly ozempic/semaglutide combined with mortality die offs from Covid/drug addiction/etc.
Statins had a similarly large effect when they came online.
Based on the decline in the following:
overdose deaths
traffic fatalities
adult-obesity rate
murder rate
er, 2 million people in America died as excessive death since 2020
that will mess with averages a bit
I mean AT LEAST two million, they don't like to report covid as cause of death anymore but rather the symptoms like death from excessive pneumonia
if a bunch of very unhealthy people die off in a short period of time, the general public will appear, statistically, to be healthier
Would the burst of deaths from Covid show up this way?
cause trump
Instagram
the U.S. is rightly considered a “rich death trap” for its young and middle-aged citizens...
Our purchasing power is declining, vis a vis wages not keeping up with inflation and in some cases falling [0]. It follows that if we aren't as rich as we used to be, we're falling into less of a "rich death trap".
0 - https://moneywise.com/research/americans-purchasing-power-pl...
Is there some Simpsons paradox/composition effect thing going on here, or something with PPP vs. real wages? For full-time employees, real wages are up[0][1], especially for the bottom quartile[2]. Overall median income appears to be down from 2019[3][4].
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881900Q [2] https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/ [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N [4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
That's a terrible article. Most of the numbers[1] are "last five years", which is a huge cherry pick right around the pandemic. It's true that there was an savings and inflation burst 2021-2023! But drawing your box around it and declaring "things are getting worse" instead of looking at the trend in both directions is just bad science.
As always, ask FRED, not random clickbait articles. Real (which means "inflation-adjusted") median household income in the United States: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
It's been going steadily upward since 2011, and is currently, except for the 2020-22 correction the article is cherry picking.
[1] Also the headline isn't an aggregate number measuring people, it's citing "97% of professions". Wat? What does that even mean? Is there a formal list out there of all the "professions" such that you can count them all? Clearly there is not, so that number become non-falsifiable.