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If only we could curb the addiction….

Another study is out concluding that more exercise and improved diets could go a long way toward slowing what has become an epidemic of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in America’s aging population, but like other such studies, it is likely to get little attention.

Why?

The answer to that question might have best come in a comment one of the authors of the study, Dr. Dean Ornish of the University of California San Fransisco, made to the MedPage Today website:

“…Physicians should encourage their patients with Alzheimer’s disease to make these lifestyle changes, as there is a good chance they may improve their cognition and function, as opposed to just slowing down the rate of getting worse.

“They don’t cost anything, and the only side effects are good ones.”

The key words there are “don’t cost anything.” The lack of cost removes the incentive for the American medical community to promote this treatment, and pretty much underlines the entire problem with American health care.

When Americans talk about this subject, they wholly avoid the basic concept of health and talk instead “health insurance” to pay for costly medical treatments that are now presumed to be the only solution to solving the ill health of so many Americans.

Lost in the discussion is that people can actually be healthy without medications. And this loss has implications all across the health spectrum in a society governed by two Ms: money and machines.

Epidemic of the unfit

Together, money and machines have conspired to turn the spawn of the country’s greatest generation, which sacrificed so much in the name of democracy, into the nation’s fattest, laziest and most unfit generation.

A nation that was in 1942 capable of fielding armies to fight a war on two fronts – one in Europe and the other in the Pacific – now finds itself struggling to find enough recruits to staff a peacetime force.

Some have taken notice.

“These aren’t just public health problems,” Daniel Bornstein, who chairs the military sector of the National Physical Activity Plan told the University of South Carolina in March. “These are very real national security problems.”

“You could argue that it’s affecting us with health care costs and so on, but the most direct, and frankly, perhaps the scariest part is we’re having trouble recruiting into our military. We’re having trouble keeping people in the military. We’re having trouble keeping up with our ‘near peer’ adversaries. And if we go to war? We may lose because we’re not physically fit enough to fight the enemy. That’s the reality.”

Or at least this is the reality of Bornstein, whose focus is on national defense. One can make a strong argument that he paid too little attention to U.S. healthcare costs that have reached $4.5 trillion per year and account for 17.3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, according to the government Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

No other global democracy comes close to spending this much money on medicines and medical procedures, according to World Bank data. Germany is closest at 12.65 percent with the socially-oriented Scandinavian countries all under 11 percent. Norway at 8.14 percent spends less than half of what the U.S. spends on medicines and medical procedures and is ranked the world’s ninth healthiest country in the Bloomberg Global Health Index.

The U.S. doesn’t even make the top 30. It’s below Estonia, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia and Cuba.

And nowhere was the unfitness of the Americans better illustrated than in the Covid-19 pandemic driven by the newly emergent SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has to date killed more than 1.2 million Americans or about 17 percent of the global total, according to the Worldometer tracker, despite the country being home to only 4.2 percent of the global population. 

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is continuing to kill Americans at the rate of 50 to 100 per day despite many of them being vaccinated against Covid-19. And one fact surrounding these deaths has not changed since the beginning of the pandemic.

Almost all the dead are among the unfittest of Americans. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports 95 percent of those dead from Covid-19 had at least one other cause of death listed on their death certificate, and in those cases, “on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death.”

The Mayo Clinic now says bluntly and simply that “the risk of serious COVID-19 illness is linked to having one or more underlying medical conditions.”

Most of these conditions – mostly notably heart disease which is still the nation’s biggest killer – are themsevles linked to the willingness of Americans to ignore a few hundred thousand years of evolution that physiologically shaped the species to be an actively moving animal.

Machines in; exercise out

“Exercise is medicine,” as smallish, outlaw group of doctors trying “to make physical activity assessment and promotion a standard in clinical care” point out, but few seem willing to listen to this fact let alone take the medicine. The group’s website admits the majority of the nation’s healthcare professionals are in denial of the reality.

“Recent results from a study analyzing 2022 U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data found that only 22.9 percent of adult women and 17.8 percent of adult men had been advised to increase their physical activity level by a doctor or other healthcare professional,” it says. 

“These low rates come despite many disheartening statistics: 1) only 24 percent of U.S. adults (18 and older) meet recommended levels of aerobic and muscle strength training; 2) 40 percent of U.S. adults are obese; and 3) between the first quarter of 2020 and the end of 2022, prescription volumes for GLP-1 medications (a new type of weight loss drug) increased 300 percent.

“These statistics point to the fact that we are not moving the needle regarding the proportion of U.S. adults who are being engaged in discussions about physical activity by their physician or healthcare professional; in fact, we might be regressing. In 2000, 28 percent of a random sample of adults reported receiving advice from their physicians to engage in regular exercise.”

The mainstream American Medical Association (AMA) is more interested in fretting about firearms homicides, which it has labeled a “public health crisis,” than about the real public health crises.

Homicides, whether committed with firearms other means, are horrible, but the 10,000 to 14,000 people who die in firearm homicides in this country in any given year number but a quarter to a third of the 36,000 to 48,000 killed by motor vehicles ever year, and they compromise a tiny fraction of those who die from heart disease and cancer linked to unhealthy lifestyles.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that the deaths of one in 10 of 40- to 69-year-old, nondisabled Americans who die every year can be attributed to a lack of fitness, and that “overall, 8.3 percent of deaths in nondisabled, adults 25 or older (are) attributed to inadequate levels of physical activity.”

The CDC reported more than 3 million Americans 25 or older died in 2022, the last year for which complete data is available.  Eight-point-three percent of that would equal about 250,000 people dead from what has come to be called “sitting disease” in a country where machines now too often dictate human behavior.

If people aren’t sitting watching TV, they’re sitting behind a computer or behind the wheel of a motor vehicle in the belief that motorized transport is the only way to get about in the country.

Motonormativity – a term coined by British researchers to describe the “unconscious biases due to cultural assumptions about the role of private cars” – has crept so deep into the American psyche that many motorists today take offense at the very idea that fellow humans would use part of the roadway, let alone all, to get around by walking or bicycling.

And Swansea University psychologist Ian Walker, the lead author on the motonormativity paper, actually understated the reach of the machines. “Private cars” are just a part of the problem.

Motonormativity now extends far beyond motor vehicles. There is a belief among many that the machines should do everything for them.

Why pedal a bicycle, when you can fit it with an electric motor and a throttle and use it like a motorcycle on trails once reserved for pedestrians and pedal cyclists? Why waste the energy to to power along with one leg when you can fit an eclectic motor to a skateboard or scooter and drive along trials and sidewalks?

Why, dear God, walk when you can ride anywhere?

Along the Eluktna LakesideTrail in Chugach State Park over the weekend, all-terrain-vehicles (ATVs) now sometimes the size of the Willy’s Jeep of World War II were busy churning up the dust to cover the 12.9 miles from a campground to the end of a road to nowhere from which the fast-retreating Eklutna Glacier can no longer be seen.

Among the reasons the half-million-acre park bordering Anchorage was established was “to provide recreational opportunities for the people by providing areas for specified uses and constructing the necessary facilities in those areas,” and driving around in a dust cloud is one of the things Americans think of as recreation in the 21st Century.

Never mind the new knowledge about the danger of particulate matter that has led the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities plus most of the state’s boroughs to require “dust control” on road construction projects.

State parks does have a portion of the Lakeside Trail posted with a 15 mph speed limit designed to help keep down the dust, but there is no enforcement, and nobody seems to care much. Some actually drive as if they enjoy creating as much dust as possible.

But maybe they’re just in a hurry to quickly get to the end of this road to nowhere because the machines have instilled in them a hurry mentality.

Road raging

Time-saving machines have in the past 50 years helped imbed the importance of time so deep in the minds of Americans that some are now almost always rushing to get somewhere even if there is no need to hurry. Psychologists contend this machine-dictated belief in the importance of speed has helped to create a “road rage generation.”

“The most common proximal triggers of road rage include one’s progress being impeded (e.g., slow driving), being put at risk (e.g., reckless behaviors of other drivers), and discourtesy or hostility of other drivers,” researchers Johan Bjureberg and James J. Gross observed in a paper published in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass in 2021.

“While progress impediment is the most common anger-triggering situation, perceived discourtesy seems to elicit the most intense rage. More distal triggers of road rage, that may modify the influence of proximal triggers, are warm temperatures, the possession of a weapon in the car, time urgency, and daily stressful events and work stressors. Some studies have demonstrated a relationship between traffic congestion and aggressive driving.”

They suggested that all of these things can create feedback loops that make some drivers increasingly aggressive and angry as their journey progresses from beginning to end.

Ironically, too, road rage outbursts have only increased since the 85th percentile standard for setting speed limits came into play in the 1960s to drive speed limits ever higher to satisfy the demand for speed. Originally designed for setting limits “on rural two-lane highways in the U.S.,” according to the University of California Institute of Transportation Studies, the standard is now applied to all roadways. 

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NATCO) describes the 85th percentile as a policy “Designed to Fail” by forcing “engineers to adjust speed limits to match observed driver behavior instead of bringing driver behavior in line with safety goals and the law.

“When enough people drive faster than the set percentile, the model rewards them by instructing traffic engineers to increase the posted speed,” and as speeds go up in urban areas so do the number of deaths.

“…A growing body of research shows that drivers base their decisions at least partially on the posted speed limit,” according to NATCO. “(And) when they see higher posted limits, and see the resulting increased speed of their peers, they drive faster too, which results in an increased speed of the street overall.”

Given the way this works, the 85th percentile standard steadily ratchet speeds highver over time, according to the organization, because “even when higher speed limit signs are posted, some number of people will still choose to drive 5 to 15 mph faster than the posted limit. These ‘high-end’ speeders travel even faster as speed limits rise and typically spread out over a wider range of speeds.”

The 85th percentile helped boost the speed limit on parts of Anchorage’s Northern Lights Boulevard to 45 mph which has a carry-over influence on driver behavior as they enter an Alaska DOT documented kill zone at Lake Otis Boulevard where traffic is supposed to begin slowing to 40 mph on the way to 35 mph at the Seward Highway.

As the Federal Highway Administration (FHA)  has, however, noted, these so-called, speed “transition zones” have to be recognizable if they are to work.

“To be effective, the delineation of a transition zone needs to be accompanied by a perceived need for the driver to actually reduce their speed,” according to the FHA.

Since Northern Lights Boulevard looks exactly the same east of Lake Otis and west of Lake Otis, drivers proceeding at the all too standard 5-to-15 mph faster than the 45 mph speed thorugh the 40 mph zone and then largely ignore the 35 mph zone that follows as the boulevard crosses the Seward Highway and enters into any area roamed by many of the homeless.

Given the almost complete lack of traffic enforcement in Alaska’s largest city, it’s not unusual to see drivers doing 50 mph or more through this part of what is called Midtown. As a result, a lot of homeless pedestrians end up dead. But given that they are homeless and that there are no serious consequences for killing a pedestrian with a motor vehicle in Anchorage anyway, no one cares.

Meanwhile, the other consequences of Americans rushing around in motor vehicles – the people discouraged from getting around the cityin healthier ways without the use of a motor vehicle because they fear for their lives, the congestion caused by everyone believing they need a motor vehicle that takes up five or 10 times as much room on the road as someone on foot or a bicycle, the staggering health care costs associated with the ever-increasing lack of physical activity on the part of Americans, and declining qualify of life and early deaths of so many – are accepted as collateral damage in society where the machines have taught people that the most important thing in life is to get from point A to point B as fast as possible even if there is no real reason to even get to point B.

And few are going to argue with this belief because there is little money to be made. Selling machines – trucks, cars, motorcycles, e-bikes, onewheels, motorized scooters, etc. – is far more profitable than selling walking shoes, and motonormativity has now so shaped the thinking of Americans that they give no thought to the costs to public health, to road repair, to environmental quality, to losses of worker productivity, to traffic jams and more associated with the machines.