The shape of the average, American male circa 2024/Wikimedia Commons

Expediting the U.S. trip to the grave

On the day a “sweeping new paper” put America’s crisis of corpulence in the headlines across the country, I was reporting on the record number of pedestrians run down by motor vehicles in Alaska’s largest city this year.

That troubling body count might, in retrospect, be the least of the consequences of a society that has built a transportation system that pays homage to machines rather than people. Last year, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, the machines claimed the lives of 7,318 people on foot in this country, people just trying to get around the old-fashioned way by using their muscles.

Granted, there might be a few in that number who stepped in front of a car or truck because they were suicidal or were so mentally unstable as to believe that if they stepped into traffic the people theoretically at the controls of the machines would be alert enough, courteous enough and caring enough to stop rather than risk killing someone.

But most of the more than 20 who died every day were innocents just trying to get from point A to point B in what has become a real-world version of the old Frogger video game. 

Their deaths are tragic, but in the bigger scheme of things, they could well be considered the smallest of the deadly consequences of motor vehicles.  There is today a glaring correlation between death rates in countries where people still walk a lot and America, where they don’t, and it can’t be ignored.

We’ll get into those deaths that number in the hundreds of thousands farther down in this story, but first, there is a need to recognize a couple of U.S. realities. One is that Americans are addicted to their cars and trucks, and the other is that politicians and government officials in this country have for decades fed this addiction by trying always to make it easier to drive anywhere and everywhere.

The country has built a transportation system that does its best to provide free dope for addicts. As a result, the U.S. has become the world’s largest don’t-walk-(or bike)-if-you-can-drive country.

The numbers long ago made this clear.

A 2012 study of “Walking and Cycling in Western Europe and the United States” found that a tenth or less of trips Americans made away from their homes were on foot or a bike. This lack of daily movement, which burns calories, is part of the reason Americans have become so fat and why so many died in the pandemic.

In most European countries, walking or bicycling accounted “for 25 percent to 35 percent of daily trips,” the authors of that study reported. The Netherlands was at the high end of the European scale with 51 percent of trips powered by muscles – 26 percent on foot and 25 percent by bike.

The United Kingdom was at the low end with 22 percent of trips by foot and 2 percent by bike. There are, however, indications the UK has changed somewhat in the more than a decade since the study was conducted.

Recognizing the costs

Over the past decade, the UK has invested billions of dollars in active travel infrastructure, according to a government report to parliament. The results are hard to miss in London, the nation’s largest city, where it was reported in 2022 that bikes had come to outnumber cars on the city’s streets at rush hour. 

A fair part of the government’s encouragement of cycling there and elsewhere, according to that report to parliament, stemmed from the recognition that “physical activity like walking and cycling can help to prevent and manage over 20 chronic conditions and diseases, including some cancers, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and depression. Physical inactivity is responsible for one in six UK deaths and is estimated to cost the UK £7.4 billion (approximately $9.3 billion) per annum.”

Ill health is as financially costly to the UK economy as it is to the U.S. economy. But there are human costs as well and the Covid-19 pandemic, which weighed heavily on those suffering from what is now called “metabolic syndrome,” served to underline this by killing hundreds of thousands of the big and unfit.

“Metabolic syndrome is closely linked to overweight or obesity and inactivity,” according to the Mayo Clinic, and one of its most obvious signs ” is a large waist circumference.” 

A large waist today defines the average American. The average American woman, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) now has a 38.7-inch waistline – almost four inches larger than the average American male in 1960 – while the waistline of the average man has ballooned to a whopping 40.5 inches, 

On the big end of the scale, American men are now so fat that Cabela’s has boosted the size of its outdoor clothing from extra-large all the way up to 6XL, which is designed to fit someone with a waist size of 60 to 62 inches and a “low hip circumference” of 66 to 68 inches.

That dude is bigger around than the average American woman is tall. And the American “body positivity” clique, which helped convince Sports Illustrated magazine to “plus-size” its swimsuit models in 2016, thinks this is just fine.

“The body positivity movement grew out of the fat acceptance movement of the 1960s,” according to Psychology Today. “The movement champions acceptance and love for all types of bodies. It challenges cultural ideals of beauty and societal perceptions and expectations around the body. It calls attention to unhelpful or harmful messages people may have received about their bodies from individuals, media, or society. And it promotes a healthy relationship with the body through awareness and acceptance.”

Much of that is well and good. “Acceptance,” ie. tolerance, was a founding principle of the often disagreeing 13 states that came together to form the United States of America. And challenging norms is – or should be – a cornerstone of any democracy.

But promoting a “healthy relationship with the body” by accepting that a yard-stick-long or longer waistline is a good thing is not healthy. It is no more healthy than promoting a “healthy relationship with (smoking, alcoholism, drug addiction or a variety of other unhealthy behaviors) through awareness and acceptance.”

Those activities were long recognized as unhealthy and treated as such. For decades, this country has been shaming and taxing smokers, and since 1971, it has spent a reported $1 trillion on a war on drugs.

The war on drugs, unfortunately, hasn’t stopped drug use, but it might have slowed it down. The CDC last year reported 107,543 people dead of drug overdoses, which seems like a big number. But even that pales when compared to the number of overweight and underexercised Americans the machines helped the pandemic kill.

So let’s look at those numbers.

Body counts

From the start of the pandemic through July 13, 2022 when the crisis was declared over even though SARS-CoV-2 infections rolled on as did influenza infections forever after the Spanish flu epidemic, the U.S. death rate for Covid-19 led death rates for what we call the “Western world.”

The data tracking website Statista put the rate at that time at 3,100 per million. The death rate in the Netherlands, where people are still walking and cycling more often than driving, was less than a third of that at 987 per million.

When one looks at the countries ranked by active-travel activity in 2012, starting with the Netherlands and dropping down to the UK at the bottom of the top-10, there is a strong, though not quite direct, correlation between getting around using one’s muscles and surviving Covid-19.

In general, the Covid-19 body counts increase from the 987 per million in the Netherlands to the 2,689 per million in the UK as the volumes of active travel decrease, but with Finland and Norway as outliers in the data set.

Both countries were in the middle of the active-travel group with the Finns reporting 31 percent of their trips being made under human rather than motor power and the Norwegians reporting that number at 26 percent.

Part of Finland’s success against Covid-19 – the country’s death rate of 893 per million was even less than that of the Netherlands – can be credited to government-sponsored efforts to improve the population’s general fitness through lifestyle changes that began in the 1970s.

By 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was ranking Finland the second fittest nation in the world behind Uganda/ Note a Covid-19 death rate of 79 per million in Uganda despite widespread poverty). The World Economic Forum that same year declared Finland the world leader in fitness “among rich Western countries where people’s jobs often require less moving around and lifting.”

“Finland wasn’t always so in shape,” the Forum’s website added. “Back in the 1960s, the country had the worst male heart-disease rate in the world. Then, in the 1970s, Finns got serious about working out, eating right, and smoking less.

“Finns don’t let the bitter cold of the Arctic Circle keep them from getting their hearts pumping outside year round. That emphasis on exercise is also a key part of the turnaround in Finnish heart health.”

Norway’s low Covid-19 death rate – 635 per million or almost a fifth of that of the U.S. even lower than Finland – can be credited to both a generally high-level of fitness, and the country’s decision to largely close its borders at the beginning of the pandemic, launch a strong testing program, and quarantine anyone found to be infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. 

Remove Finland and Norway – fifth and sixth among the active-travel countries – from the list active-travel countries and the Covid death rate for the active countries in  Europe country is almost a straight drop from the Netherlands at 987 deaths per million to Denmark at 1,111; Germany at 1,708; Sweden at 1,849; Austria at 2,258; France at 2,116; Belgium and 2,770 and the UK at 2,689.

The death rate average for the top-five most active travel countries is 1,110 per million or almost exactly a third of the U.S. death rate. The top 10 average of 1,602 per million is about half of the U.S. death rate.

As of July 13, 2022, more than 1 million Americans – 1,021,276 to be exact – were reported dead of Covid-19. If the U.S. death rate had been reduced by half, more than 510,000 lives would have been saved. If it had been cut by two-thirds, more than 674,000 people would have avoided death.

A high cost

That all those people died instead is the cost of the American lifestyle circa 2020.

Granted, correlation is not causation. It could be that our health care system is just second rate compared to that of the European countries. It could be our doctors are worse than theirs. It could be that Americans are just unlucky.

But there are connections here that cannot be ignored. Daily physical activity has been shown to strengthen the immune system.  This was known before the pandemic began, and pandemic-driven research only made this clearer.

In this case, fitness was arguably as valuable as vaccines and maybe more so, though a medical industry built on selling medicine and treatments would never publicly state this.

The data, however, speaks for itself. There have not been any Covid-19 deaths reported among the Navy SEALs who refused to get vaccinated, and you have to believe it would have been big news if any of them had died.

No active professional cyclists – many of whom were infected before vaccines became available – were reported to have died of Covid-19. The same was true for professional marathon runners, although several amateurs were reported to be among the dead.

One of them was 51-year-old Associated Press reporter Prinda Mulpramook who was said to be “the picture of health” and recovering from infection with his lungs “clear” and his vitals “good” when some “breathing issues” sent him to a New York hospital where he died “13 hours later,” as People magazine reported.

This was in April 2020 at the height of Covid-19 hysteria when many were screaming “listen to the scientists” and few were giving much consideration to what the science said. The exact cause of Mulpramook’s death was never reported.

The science was left to a cousin who wrote on Facebook that Mulpramook  “had no underlying health problems and would not be considered high risk by any means” and proclaimed her “anger at all the people I see STILL not taking this virus seriously. All the people who think they are invincible, because they are young or healthy or arrogant.”

As it turned out, the young and healthy were largely invincible. In the first two years of the pandemic, fewer than 8,700 Americans under the age of 30 died of Covid-19, and nearly all of those who died had pre-existing conditions or what have come to be called comorbidities.

In the same time period, CDC data indicates more than twice as many people under age 30 committed suicide, with some of those deaths apparently linked to the early pandemic hysteria, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. 

The broader, long-term consequences of that hysteria are still being weighed.

“Prevalences of adolescent mental health diagnoses and suicide were on the rise even before the pandemic,” researchers reported in the peer-reviewed Journal of Public Health and Emergency in September. “Research has (since) shown that the pandemic and the coinciding restrictions, stay-at-home orders, and lingering impacts have had a detrimental effect on mental health in adolescents including increased prevalence of mental health diagnoses like depression and eating disorders as well as suicidal behaviors.

Educational performance has at the same time taken a big hit with the Brookings think tank late last year reporting that “the harm to student learning during the Covid-19 pandemic has been well documented, and an incredible influx of resources – including $260 billion in federal government investment – has been dedicated to support schools’ recovery. Much of this money has been spent developing and expanding academic recovery efforts such as after-school tutoring and summer learning programs,” which have had low success rates.

As of September of this year, the Center on Reinventing Public Education was reporting that the average student had recovered roughly a third of the learning losses in math and a quarter in reading with Center director Robin Lake telling Education Week that “the bottom line for us was: This is not over.

“It’s not a thing of the past and it’s probably not going to be for some time.”

And there is no doubt the American transportation system – which encourages and helps drive the nation’s slothdemic by making it difficult to walk or cycle anywhere – helped the country get here.

Against this backdrop, it today seems beyond ironic that the late President John F. Kennedy warned of this in 1960 at a time when the great decline in American fitness was just beginning, at a time when a 180-pound man was considered “hefty,” the average woman had a 24 to 25-inch waste, and the rate of childhood obesity was so low the National Center for Health Statistics barely bothered to track it. (It’s now approaching a quarter of children age 12 to 19.

“…The same civilizations which produced some of our highest achievements of philosophy and drama, government and art, also gave us a belief in the importance of physical soundness which has become a part of Western tradition; from the mens sana in corpore sano of the Romans to the British belief that the playing fields of Eton brought victory on the battlefields of Europe,” Kennedy wrote.

“This knowledge, the knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself. But it is a knowledge which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting.”

The forgetting was just beginning then, but one might well consider fitness now largely forgotten with a goodly number of modern-day conservatives – many if not most of them less conservative than Kennedy and surely more rotund – declaring any efforts to get Americans moving by altering transportation systems constitutes “a war on cars.”

As if the machines weren’t killing Americans quickly or more often slowly by the hundreds of thousands per year while naive ninnies on the left, being every bit as addicted to cars and trucks as those on the right, fantasize about solving the deadly problems of motor vehicles by replacing their hydrocarbon-fueled, internal combustion engines with electric motors.

The latest research indicates electric vehicles won’t even “solve” global warming. And let’s not get into any debates as to what anyone believes about global warming because no matter what you believe, the serious consequences are still predictions that exist, like all predictions, in the future.

The public health consequences of a transportation system that ignores the needs of people in order to provide for the machines are already here. Those costs are written in the numbers of pedestrians and cyclists run down and killed on American streets every day, the country’s horrific Covid death rate, its $173 billion per year obesity problem, and its now declining life expectancy.