One of America’s biggest problems today/Wikimedia Commons
The Make America Fit Again dilemma
Lost in the fog of a cultural war that has been raging for years now in these UnUnited States of Amercia are some of the biggest societal problems facing the country, and Alaska is at the forefront of at least two of them.
The first involves a transportation system badly in need of both repair and reform. Alaska has the worst roads in the country – in part because of bad soils and a nasty northern climate, in part due to urban roads built to lower than highway standards to save money only to have motorists zooming down them at highway speeds that hasten damage to the road surface.
As to the reform of transportation, Alaska is a national laggard in trying to do anything to encourage people to get out of those vehicles and move around under their own power so as to help deal with the nation’s biggest problem, the national slothdemic.
Sadly, the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act front and center at the moment in the nation’s lefty-right cultural war isn’t going to do anything to fix this. It’s just going to add to the distraction that the culture war has become.
Consider Medicaid, the government program that pays for drugs, medical treatments, hospitalization, home care and more for poor Americans.
The right thinks easy access to this government-funded program is being abused by some and wants to further restrict the program. The left, at least in Alaska, thinks the program needs to be expanded to protect the Alaska “way of life” as if being poor and in need of government assistance were the preferred way of life in the 49th state.
Preoccupied with arguments as to who is most fiscally responsible and who is most virtuous, both sides miss the bigger issue that now has the country spending more than $800 billion per year on Medicaid.
America has become a society plagued by ill health to which the 21st-century answer has been ever more drugs. According to Singlecare, a prescription discount service for drugs, “the average American takes around four prescription medications per year” while the country as a whole “consumes 8 percent of the world’s prescription drug despite making up just 4 percent of its population.”
Or, to put this simply, America is plagued with sickness, and sickness has historically been a sign of societies in decline.
Modern medicine got us here, and it needs a reset to start creating truly healthy people instead of propping up ever more sick people because drugs are, no matter how you look at it, a stop-gap or last gasp measure when it comes to public health.
Very, very few truly fit and healthy Americans, be they young or old, were killed by Covid. Furthermore, the latest peer-reviewed research has found “pre‐Covid baseline data suggest(ing) that lower, measured cardiorespiratory fitness and lower levels of self‐reported physical activity before Covid may be associated with subsequent long-Covid.”
Or, in other words, a bunch of the unfit people who survived Covid are now struggling with the long-lasting consequences of Covid.
Unfortunately, most Americans and most of the country’s health care leaders seem to have missed this pandemic message, and they seem somehow able to overlook the in-your-face, hard-to-miss visual reality that the country has become a breeding ground for fat, out-of-shape and unhealthy citizens.
All of which is why American lifespans are steadily slipping behind those of the rest of the Western World.
OK, in fairness, there are a few in the medical community who get it.
Voices in the wilderness
“Nearly half of Americans are obese,” they wrote. “With rates of obesity more than doubling between 1990 and 2021, obesity is a significant risk factor for chronic diseases, including heart, liver, and kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, some cancers and dementia.”
The lack of comments on their commentary on a website where anything written about the antics of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. draws an outpouring of opinions about says it all. Only healthcare professionals are allowed to comment at MedPage, and they were earlier this week rushing to offer their views on whether Kennedy should kick his tanning-bed habit because of the increased risk of skin cancer.
Apparently the skin of the 71-year-old Kennedy was of more concern to them than the health of the American children even with JAMA (formerly the Journal of the American Medical Association) reporting that mortality rates for those under age 19 are rising.
This is in contrast to what has been happening in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the 14 European nations that along with the U.S. comprise the 18-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD18).
The situation doesn’t look to get better anytime soon, either, given the large pool of youth already reported to be battling chronic medical conditions, ie. comorbidities.
This should not come as a big surprise with so many subsisting on a diet of highly processed foods – quit stuffing those Pringles in your mouth and pay attention for a minute here! – while sitting in front of some sort of screen, be it on a TV, computer, or phone.
In America, Allan-Blitz and Klauser noted, “the type of food people eat is not the only cause of obesity. The rise in ultra-processed food consumption beginning around the early 2000s was preceded by substantial declines in physical activity.
“In 1991, 42 percent of high school students attended daily physical education classes; as of 2023, just 27 percent did. The 2024 U.S. Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth found that fewer than one in three children ages six to 17 years met the goal of 60 minutes of daily physical activity. In another study, physical activity in youth decreased by about 4 to 5 percent per year of age.”
What the hell is wrong with these kids?
That’s a pretty easy question to answer. They’re following the example of their sit-on-their-ass parents in a country where the so-called “sedentary lifestyle” has become a big, fat problem.
Americans just can’t seem to get their heads around the reality that exercise shaped the evolution of our species, and in the process became a building block of our immune and healing systems.
Exercise is basically natural medicine.
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That is unfortunate.
“Exercise is Medicine” ought to be a mantra repeated over and over in every school in the country, but instead of embracing exercise as medicine, U.S. schools have been fleeing from it.
As Allan-Blitz and Klausner noted, nearly 75 percent of states still, technically, require physical education in elementary through high school, but over half of the states permit students to substitute other activities in place of physical education or fail to mandate a specific amount of instructional time for physical activity.
Alaska has a long list of physical standards students are supposed to meet, but no formal testing program to see if they do. And the state admits to recognizing that “national standards recommend that elementary schools should provide 150 minutes of physical education each week during the school year. (But) not all schools in Alaska provide that much.”
The Anchorage School District’s idea of improving “wellness” was to in 2023 increase a 45-minute block of time reserved for lunch and recess to 50 minutes. The inclusion of a 30-minute recess minimum was billed as a “significant expansion in recess for schools that were only using 20 minutes of the overall 45-minute block for recess.”
Thirty minutes of physical activity at recess, five times per week, would meet the recommended national minimum if, of course, students spent those 30 minutes engaged in physical activity rather than sitting or standing around.
When researchers have monitored recess, it has fallen badly short at producing physical activity.
“On average, children in this study did not achieve 50 percent of recess time in physical activity,” one study concluded. At that rate, recess in Anchorage would help children accumulate less than a quarter of the daily dose of 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for children that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says they need to stay healthy.
The country’s epidemic of childhood obesity provides ample evidence as to how poorly the country is doing in seeing to it that kids get enough exercise. But what should we expect given cities designed to make it difficult and even dangerous to walk or ride a bike to school – cities controlled by political leaders suffering so badly from Motor-Vehicle Derangement Syndrome (MVDS) or “car brain” that the thought of safe streets to school doesn’t even enter their thinking.
The result is that so many parents now drive their kids to school that traffic jams develop in and around schools, leaving those same parents worrying their children could be run over before they get through the school door.
“And many parents in a new national poll agree that school traffic can be hazardous to student safety, with over a third saying parent drivers speeding and not paying attention are major problems around their child’s school.”
In arguing for a national campaign to Make America Fit Again, Allan-Blitz and Klausner did give the Trump administration credit for “taking aim at nutrition” as part of today’s problem (a move that probably didn’t win them any fans on MedPag), but added that “to effectively address chronic disease, efforts to promote exercise must not fall by the wayside.
“Evidence suggests diet-plus-exercise programs are superior to diet alone in producing weight loss long-term. Additional research shows that regular physical activity in schools lowers the rates of obesity. One study found that increasing school physical education from 1.5 hours per week to 4.5 hours per week in kids ages five to 11 years (at inclusion) resulted in an approximately 50 percent reduction in obesity risk after five years.
Listen to the scientists?
This is the science, but in the wake of the pandemic, the ranting about listening to the scientists, or at least the science, appears to have died.
High-intensity activities in schools? The kind of activities that cause homo sapiens to work up a sweat? Try selling that idea to your local school board in a country that has spawned fat acceptance, fat pride, fat empowerment and fat liberation movements as if being fat is a good thing.
It’s not.
It’s not healthy for the people who are fat, and it “costs the US healthcare system almost $173 billion a year” and growing, according to the CDC.
American progressives over-stuffed with good intentions should be outraged at the self-harm fat people are doing to themselves, given the health parallels between obesity, smoking, alcoholism and drug addictions. And penny-pinching American conservatives should be appalled at what our epidemic of girth is costing the country.
Were sense common (unfortunately, it’s not) you’d think they might collectively recognize that it is in the national interest to spread the message that Americans need to get moving again because “Exercise is Medicine.”
But good luck with that.
On top of this, the UnUnited States are now home to a $4.9 trillion industry that makes money off drugs, medical procedures and hospitals. And unhealthy people have a much greater need for those things than do healthy people.
This is the dark side of capitalism and, ironically, America’s form of socialism as well. The push for Medicaid funding is, after all, about more than just good intentions, which many have, and virtue signaling, which makes many feel good about themselves.
The push for Medicaid is also about a desire to keep public funds flowing to big pharma, doctors, hospitals, nursing homes and even air taxis that haul rural Alsakans to the city for health checks. There are a lot of businesses that benefit from the government spending close to $1 trillion to pay to treat people often unwilling to engage in the smallest of lifestyle changes to help improve their health, and sometimes uncaring as to whether they live or die.
And if the government wants to pay to keep people alive even if they don’t much care to be alive, it’s nothing but a good thing for a $4.9 trillion health care industry that, on average, now costs $14,570 per person per year in this country.
All indications are that the nation could significantly reduce that spending by making Americans fit again, but that would require a national will to become a healthy country rather than a heavily medicated country.
And that will, sadly, appears lacking.
Categories: Commentary
We are way too busy declaring war on food coloring to consider how much crap we are actually stuffing in our mouths. The PR firm that came up with, “Make America Healthy Again” for RFK Jr deserves a special place in Hell, lol, as it not only dismisses medical science, but serves as another distractor from any real focus on making America healthy.
I am glad you spent some time on student transportation, as that is a growing crisis, as to the often nonsensical use of yellow buses, the mendacity of “safe routes to schools”, and the insistence that children need be transported at all.
And districts, asked to put their money where their mouths are with respect to motor vehicles used by staff, parents, students and sibs by charging for parking or giving staff free bus passes, double down on free parking and allowing parents to shut down traffic in neighborhoods queuing for kids
I am reminded of the ASD effort to address student nutrition by taking soda pop out of vending machines in our high schools (a significant hit as the proceeds of these machines funded lots of exercise activities) while the district pushed apple juice (more expensive, more calorically dense – read ‘more sugar’, and thankfully, broadly rejected).
Is this kind of myopia biological, or just the consequence of the #meminemore aesthetic that the #magat nation promotes?