The latest miracle potion
Make America Healthy Again
These now unUnited States of America have a drug problem, and it’s a lot bigger than the illicit chemicals that have cost the country more than $1 trillion since the War on Drugs was declared in 1971.
Four years before that declaration, Jefferson Airplane, a rock band, pretty well described the drug problem awaiting in the new millennium with a song titled, “White Rabbit.”
As the rockers put it, “one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small….
“When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go, and you’ve just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low, go ask Alice. I think she’ll know.”
The first line of the song would come to be so often misquoted as “one pill makes you happy, and one pill makes you sad” that if you now type that line into the Google search engine, Google’s AI will tell you that “the correct line from the song ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane is actually, ‘One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small’ – referring to the idea that a single psychedelic pill can drastically alter your perception of reality, making things seem much bigger or smaller than they actually are.”
Credit Google AI for getting at least one thing right no matter how often it gets things wrong. But, sadly, this is now a country where one pill will make you happy; one pill will make you sad; one injection will make you skinny and another five will save you from all sorts of respiratory infections.
Maybe.
Since the experimentation with psychedelics in the ’60s to the belief in pill-filled happiness in the ’70s and ’80s, America has become a drug-driven wonderland with pills and medical procedures to make you prettier, slimmer, more focused, less focused, and on and on.
By the time the SARS-CoV-2 virus arrived on the scene in 2020 to introduce us all to the new disease Covid-19, the nation was so tied to drugs as the solution to anything and everything that then-President Joe Biden ordered even fit, young members of the U.S. military, including members of Special Forces operations who are among the fittest people in the country, to get vaccinated against Covid-19 even though the virus posed virtually no risk to them.
The virus was, and still is, killing the old and unhealthy, not the young and fit. This is not news. The profile of dead victims goes all the way back to an August 2020 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) noting that only 6 percent of those dead from Covid-19 in this country were fully healthy.
Well documented
At that time, the CDC report was picked up by and repeated by many on social media, which led to the mainstream media and some medical experts trying to dismiss the data as “bogus.” This is how one science website described the situation:
“In other words, 6 percent of people who died when they had Covid-19 didn’t have underlying conditions, such as diabetes, asthma or heart disease, and didn’t experience any medical complications, such as kidney failure or sepsis. But the other 94 percent of deaths were still caused by COVID-19, infectious disease experts said.”
Maybe there’s some difference between six and a half dozen that explains this. But the reality is that from the beginning Covid-19 was killing few healthy people, making it ethically hard to argue for injecting anything into the bodies of fit and healthy military personnel, especially if they were opposed to the injection.
So how did the nation get the point of Biden ordering such injections?
Blame a religious-like faith in “modern medicine” as the way to better health, our inherent human laziness, a pill-pushing medical profession, and a nation fallen victim TV, computers and efforts to make roadway travel ever easier for motor vehicles and ever more difficult/dangerous for travel by any other means that began with the end of the Kennedy administration in 1963.
Say goodbye to the “50-mile hike,” and hello to the “sedentary lifestyle.”
First TV and then computers, aided by the ever-growing American addiction to cars and trucks, would help turn Americans into the fattest, laziest, and most medicated humans in the world in the new millennium.
There is no doubt most of them needed the Covid-19 vaccine. A cross-sectional analysis of spending on drugs from 2016–2019 – the period just before SARS-CoV-2 burst onto the scene – “estimated 42 percent percent of American adults 18 and older suffer from multiple chronic conditions (i.e., multimorbidity).”
The results of that analysis were published in peer-reviewed Frontiers in Public Health in 2022 by which time the percentage might have been slightly lower given the approximately 1.1 million Americans the CDC reported dead to Covid-19 between 2019 and 2022, most of them suffering from comorbidities or multimorbidities.
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic helped make “comorbidity” a household word in this country. But long before that happened, chronic diseases had proven themselves a gold mine for a U.S. “healthcare industry” which grew from a business comprising 5 percent of the gross domestic product in 1960 into one now accounting for 17 to 18 percent of the GDP, according to the data-tracking website Statista.
Big, big business
Healthcare spending neared 20 percent of GDP during the height of the pandemic in 2020 but had fallen to 17.3 percent by 2022, the lowest since 2014, an apparent reflection of the savings involved in so many older and sicker Americans killed by Covid-19 and no longer in need of medicines or medical treatment.
Still, chronic diseases continue to support a massive industry in this country.
Banks are fourth on the list followed by pharmaceutical wholesaling with the auto industry finally appearing at number six with revenues of $1.2 billion per year.
The combined total for hospitals, the drug and cosmetic industry, the health and medical insurance business, and pharmaceuticals – all of which are involved in the healthcare industry – totals more than $5.5 billion per year, making the healthcare business an economic colossus benefiting from unhealthy Americans.
Healthcare spending the U.S. dwarfs that of the European Union and the United Kingdom where, according to the World Bank, such spending accounts for less than 11 percent of GDP, meaning other Western world nations spend about 65 percent of what the U.S. spends on healthcare.
Yet despite this heavy spending, the U.S. has fallen behind those nations in life expectancy and is projected to fall even farther behind in the years ahead.
Forty-three countries are already at 80.4 years or more and on the rise. On a global level, the U.S. – now ranked 49th in life expectancy – is projected to fall to 74th by 2050. This could well push U.S. life expectancy below that of Cuba, a third-world country.
“The rise in obesity and overweight rates in the U.S. signals a public health crisis of unimaginable scale,” the IHME report on life expectancy declared, but instead of worrying about this, North America is in the midst of a “fat activism” movement that ignores the crisis and goes so far as to accuse those who promote fitness of trying to co-opt the “body positive” movement.
“…Fatphobia is not about health,” they add. “There is no one healthy shape, clothing size, weight, or age – everyone’s version of a healthy body is different and equally valid.”
Unfortunately, the latest research into obesity has documented the opposite with health researchers today arguing there is a clearly unhealthy shape. Because of it, they are arguing for replacing the “body mass index” (BMI) long used to assess obesity with a “body roundness index” (BRI) given data showing that those who store their body fat around the waist are significantly more likely to die early deaths than those who don’t.
The answer to this big, fat, beer-belly of a problem being offered by the U.S. healthcare industry is, predictably, another drug. The hot one of the moment is a semaglutide that functions as a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist to promote insulin release and reduce blood glucose levels.
The drug has since been all over the news with the BBC a couple of weeks ago headlining that “Weight-loss drugs may boost health in many ways,” and Vox at about the same time pushing a story on “How weight-loss drugs ended the era of ‘lifestyle changes.'”
“Ozempic is one brand name of a series of drugs called GLP-1 agonists that have exploded in popularity in the last few years. These injectables mimic hormones that slow digestion and trigger satiety, which means you eat less and want to eat less,” the story said.
Ah yes, the good, old magic bullet has arrived, and this one might be able to kill a bunch of birds at once if you believe the hype.
The New York Times jumped in just days ago to add that “Ozempic May Protect Against Alzheimer’s,” a disease linked to metabolic syndrome which is linked to obesity, Type 2 diabetes and more.
All this Ozempic good news has reportedly had celebrities racing to get their hands on the drug or several others similar to it, and they have raved about how it works.
Realities
It’s hard to imagine how fat Whoppi must have been if losing 12.4 percent of her body weight amounted to “almost two people.”
That said, tirzepatide would appear one of the better weight loss drugs. Semaglutides did worse in the weight loss department with the study reporting, that five “random control trials (RCTs) that included 4,421 participants reported an 11.4 percent greater weight loss than placebo.”
That study also warned that all these “antiobesity medications (AOMs)” show some effectiveness in helping people lose 5 percent or greater weight loss “in primary care settings…However, real-world studies have found poor medication adherence in clinical practice. (And) due to the counter-regulatory metabolic changes that occur with weight reduction, such as reduced metabolic rate and increased appetite, weight gain is common when AOMs are discontinued.”
Not to mention the danger of failing to maintain “lean body mass (muscle mass) during weight loss that is important for mobility and physical function, particularly among older adults who have a lower lean body mass due to aging,” the study. “AOMs should be used in adults aged 65 years or older with caution. Clinicians’ physical activity counseling should integrate resistance training (eg, weight lifting, resistance bands) to decrease lean body mass loss and enhance functional strength and mobility.”
Exercise studies would indicate that giving patients the placebo and getting them to seriously engage the resistance training might well lead to weight losses as great or greater than with the drugs without the loss of muscle mass, reductions in metabolic rate, or changes in mobility.
And then there is the cost. Ozempic is reported to cost about $1,000 per month, and it is reported to take six to 12 weeks to lose 5 percent of body weight, or about 10 pounds for a 200 pounder. This would make the weight-loss cost about $200 per pound or slightly less if you weigh 250 pounds and lose 5 percent or slightly more if you weigh 170.8 pounds and lose 5 percent.
Healthline says the latter number is now the average weight of the average, American female reported to stand 5 feet, 4 inches tall. A healthy weight for a woman of that height is considered 110 to 145 pounds. Two-thousand dollars and a couple of months Ozempic could get that woman about eight and half pounds closer to the upper range of healthy, but still 17.3 pounds too heavy.
Swallowing a placebo (ie. a sugar pill), eating less and exercising more could save the woman a lot of money to produce similar results with the bonus of improving her health in other areas. Exercise can be found for free for those willing to walk or jog, and the latest research has found a dose-related connection to weight or, in simple English, the more you exercise, the more weight you lose.
As with Ozempic, there is no magic bullet here either. People have different metabolic rates, and some people have a harder time than others losing weight no matter what they do. The cycling press in the early 2000s, for instance, was regularly abuzz about the weight problems of cyclist Jan Ullrich, the 1997 winner of the Tour de France and an Olympic gold medalist, who invariably ballooned in the off-season when he cut back his training mileage.
“Ullrich’s affection for cakes is no secret. The man from Rostock in the former East Germany began the 2000 season more than 10 kilos (22 pounds) overweight,” The Sydney Morning Herald reported that year. Years later in an interview with Velo, the 6-foot-tall Ullrich indicated that his overweight 81 kilos was sort of his normal weight, saying that “I weigh 81 kilos (178 pounds). When I won the Tour de France, I was 70 kilos (154 pounds)” or 24 pounds less.
Many American men would probably kill to be 81 kilos slim these days. The CDC reports the average American male of 2024 stood 5-feet, 9-inches tall – three inches shorter than Ullrich – and weighed 199.8 pounds. That average male was only an inch taller than in 1960, but 35.5 pounds heavier, the agency reported, and for the vast majority of American men, the extra weight isn’t in muscle.
The good news is that you can walk it off.
“Aerobic exercise at least 150 minutes per week was associated with clinically important reductions in waist circumference and measures of body fat.”
The CDC now recommends 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week. The new study suggests more might be better, and the words “moderate” and “vigorous” are important qualifiers. The CDC defines the former as a “brisk walk” and the latter as “jogging or running.”
The Health Survey is self-reported, and people responding to self-reported surveys tend to fudge their answers toward what they perceive to be the expected right answer. This could be especially true when it comes to that “moderate” or “vigorous” element of exercise. Anyone who has spent much time in airports or shopping centers in this country will have recognized that slow walkers have become an American norm.
To lose weight, they need to move faster and more. For true weight-loss results – something on the order of 10 to 15 pounds – the American College of Sports Medicine has suggested “225 to 420 minutes per week at moderate intensity.”
This might sound like a lot, but the U.S. Census reports the average American now wastes 268 minutes of the working week sitting on his or her butt driving to and from work, and nearly 9 percent of the population spends 600 minutes per week fighting traffic to get to and from their place of employment.
In some U.S. metro areas, including the nation’s capital, it is now often faster to get around on a bicycle, which adds exercise to the day, than in a motor vehicle due to this traffic congestion.
Unfortunately, pedaling like walking requires some use of muscles and many Americans have become fundamentally lazy. Others are afraid of speeding and distracted drivers wandering out of the driving lanes, ignoring stop lights or stop signs, and otherwise driving badly because there is little reason for them to pay attention given the general lack of consequences if they hit someone.
This amounts to the equivalent of the deadly, Washington, D.C., midair plane crash now much in the news happening every three and a half days. The National Transportation Safety Board is in the midst of an exhaustive investigation as to how the midair collision occurred. The agency is almost certain to recommend changes in operational standards to prevent such crashes in the future.
Crashes that kill so-called vulnerable road users are seldom the subject of in-depth investigations. Many are barely investigated at all, and the mainstream media almost never pays attention unless someone notable is involved in the killing.
Even then, the coverage is invariably superficial, although South Dakota Public Media made an exception in 2020 after that state’s attorney general ran down a man walking along a road and kept going, leaving the man to die.
A crash reconstruction found that AG Jason Ravnsborg had all four tires on the shoulder of that road when he struck Joe Boever, whose body was found a couple of feet off the shoulder. For this bit of bad driving, Ravnsbord was charged with three misdeamoners and pled guilty to two of them – making an illegal lane change and driving while using his phone – as part of a plea deal that resulted in his getting off with nothing but a $1,000 fine.
That sparked more than a little outrage in South Dakota, but after digging down into the records on South Dakota road deaths, public media reported that Ravnsborg’s treatment was the norm.
Of at least 31 other drivers who were not legally intoxicated when they struck and killed a pedestrian, SDPM said, 20 were never changed with anything, and the other eleven were either cited for a traffic offense or charged with a low-level misdemeanor.
Everywhere the same
This is not unusual anywhere in the country, and it did catch the eye of the NTSB. The federal agency conducted thorough investigations into road deaths as they relate to pedestrians in 2018 and cyclists in 2019 and then issued lengthy reports.
Few of the safety recommendations in those reports have been adopted, and partially as a result, the number of people who feel safe enough use their muscles for power in the U.S. has continued to decline, helping to create an associated rise in traffic congestion further discouraging active travel.
According to the Department of Energy, the number of people driving to work has risen from 64 percent in 1960 to near 85 percent today with the U.S. Census reporting that 69.2 percent of those drivers are alone in their motor vehicles, an increasing number of which are full-size cars and trucks that take up the most space in traffic lanes.
This all helps to create ever more crowded roads and congestion that leads not only to a lot of unhealthy stress for many drivers, but to increasing numbers of “road rage” killings.
Those deaths are tragic as are road fatalities now matter whether they involve people in or out of motor vehicles. Every year, 40,000 to 45,000 people – more than 80 percent of them passengers in or operators of motor vehicles – are now killed in this country, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Another 2.4 million are left with significant injuries, according to the National Safety Council, but the consequences of Americans driving ever more and moving under their own power even less, might be greater.
Since the 1980s, the country has been experiencing an ever-worsening epidemic of childhood obesity. The CDC reports that one in five American children and adolescents now qualify as obese.
If this weren’t bad enough in the moment, it bodes worse for the future of those children.
The study, a meta-analysis of many studies on childhood obesity, warned that along with the health damage done children, this epidemic ” is projected to cause $13.62 billion in annual direct medical costs and $49.02 billion in annual indirect costs” by 2050, underling “the urgent need of preventing childhood overweight and obesity early on.”
There is a cheaper alternative suggested by the “Exercise is Medicine” nonprofit – but semaglutides are getting so much more attention these days that one almost has to wonder if that nonprofit organization founded 18 years ago, and little heard of since, isn’t just a hangout for a few doctors who want to assuage their guilt about what a pill-pushing business medicine has become.
Efforts to reach the organization, both by phone and by email, have proven futile for months, and publicly it’s almost invisible. But a few brave doctors are talking about the potential downside of semaglutides.
“The benefits of these drugs cannot be denied when they are taken as intended – meaning indefinitely. But what happens to the body and mind when these medications are discontinued? This is where the problem lies.
“Clinical trials of semaglutide and tirzepatide show that the average patient regains two-thirds of the weight lost (and similar changes in cardiometabolic variables) within the first year of discontinuation. For some, the return of weight feels almost instantaneous, and they often regain more than they initially lost.
“The result? Many patients cycle on and off treatment, and in the end, the only thing they’ve lost is money — upwards of $12,000 per year (if their insurance doesn’t cover it, and most plans don’t). (And) this vicious cycle may have profound long-term implications for the physical, mental, and economic health of our nation – and the millions struggling with obesity.”
Drugs that people must take forever are, however, a drug company’s dream. There is no ignoring that there is a lot of potential profit involved here either, and in a free-market economy, money matters.
Add to this the simple fact that it is a lot easier for physicians to write prescriptions than to try and change the lifestyles of their patients, plus the reality that the political establishment is beholden to a motor-addicted majority more concerned about personal convenience than the health problems of a society that sits too much and moves too little, and you’ve pretty much got the perfect storm for a national health decline.
The thought of this can prove depressing. Obesity is costing the country a small fortune, and the U.S. military is increasingly worrying about finding enough young, fit Americans to field an army.
But hey, the good side is there are a variety of different drugs now available to treat depression. And though the science might say exercise is as good or better for treating this all-too-common disorder, we’re thankfully well beyond that brief period of “listen to the scientists” and besides, exercise makes you sweaty.
Life can be made so much easier when one pill makes you happy and one shot makes you thin….
Categories: Commentary, News
I’m reading Roberta Sheldon’s book “The Mystery of the Cache Creek Murders” and I am immediately struck how weak the majority of Alaskans are today. These miners would walk over 40 miles back to Talkeetna just to get a new tin of snuff. Physical labor has been made a sign of lower class in America and anyone with cash on hand prefers to hire out for laborious tasks. The thought of building your own cabin from trees in the forest has become the new 1% in AK. I am the only one on my street who still cuts and splits their own firewood…any of my neighbors who “burn” prefers to get their wood delivered already split and they usually pay to have it stacked. I guess they would rather use their time going back and forth to the local quack doctors getting the pill of the month.