Americans even unhealthier than you thought

Unless you’ve been walking around with your eyes closed, the general decline in health in these unUnited States should have long been obvious in the abundance of double-wide, slow-walkers struggling through airports, shopping centers and anywhere else people still rely on their feet, rather than motor vehicles, to move.

But now comes a study out of Northwestern University suggesting the situation might be even worse than it visually appears.

Researchers there have reported finding that a majority of Americans have hearts “older than their chronological age – sometimes by more than a decade.”

Their study of “14 ,140 participants representing approximately 138 million U.S.” residents was published as a research letter in JAMA Cardiology this week. It pointed to a particularly serious problem among working-class Americans with less-than-college educations.

“Specifically,” the JAMA letter said, “22.8 percent of women and 32.5 percent of men with a high school education or less had a…risk age more than 10 years older than their chronological age.”

This should come as no big surprise either. The general fitness of Americans, especially younger Americans, has been in decline for years.

“The Department of Defense has known about this problem for quite a long time,” according to Daniel Bornstein at The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina. “There’s probably two decades worth of evidence showing that fitness levels of recruits were declining and musculoskeletal injuries during basic training were on the increase” because of a basic lack of fitness.

Associated heart decay is to be expected. The heart is the most important muscle in the body,  and it is well-documented that muscles atrophy if they are not used.

“The consequence of acute periods of (physical inactivity) on cardiovascular health are significant,” U.S., Canadian and Australian cardiologists reported three years ago in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“…It is likely that it is the insidious, cumulative impacts of a sedentary lifestyle over a lifetime that, when combined with the effects of aging and other comorbidities, may precipitate the onset of (heart failure). By the age of 60 years, when incident heart failure rates start to increase, sedentary behaviors have been entrenched in the lifestyle of the individual for decades, and consequently both exercise tolerance and quality of life are reduced.”

The newer research would suggest that for some, these entrenched sedentary behaviors may now have significantly reduced quality of life and increased the risks of heart attack by age 50.

One can thank, at least in part, an American medical community that has confused “medical care” with “health care” and helped to make this country a global leader in spending on medicines and medical procedures while U.S. life expectancy falls further and further behind those of the residents of other highly developed nations.

By 2050, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington Medical School has forecast that the country’s global ranking will fall “below nearly all high-income and some middle-income countries.

Missed opportunity

The U.S. medical community had a golden opportunity to slap Americans across the face with this reality when the SARS-CoV-2 virus brought the Covid-19 pandemic to U.S. shores in 2020.

Despite a lot of medical-community-fueled, media hysteria about how Covid was an indiscriminate killer (dare one use the “misinformation” label here), it was clear early on that this was not the case.

The pandemic was less than a year old when researchers in the United Kingdom reported that “simple measures of physical fitness, such as self-reported walking pace, may also be important risk markers.”

By then, obesity had already been identified as a risk factor, but UK researchers who examined the records of more than 400,000 Brits reported that a lack of physical fitness was an even bigger risk.

“Slow walkers had the highest risk regardless of obesity status,” they wrote. “…Compared to normal weight brisk walkers, the odds ratio of severe disease and COVID-19 mortality in normal weight slow walkers was” nearly two and a half times greater for hospitalization and close to four times greater for death.

A lot of these slow walkers were, of course, old because everyone slows down with age. But because those with entrenched sedentary behaviors slow some of the old folk down to a crawl, there were big consequences recorded in the U.S. death toll.

More than 75 percent of the approximately 1.4 million Americans dead from Covid by June of 2023 were over the age of 65, according to the data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

People of that age naturally suffer to greater or lesser degrees from immunosenescence, the natural decay of the immune system with age. But the sedentary lifestyle has been shown to accelerate the rate of immunosenescence just as it accelerates the rate of heart decay.

Heart decay latter might help explain the significant number of U.S. Covid deaths among those in the 50 to 64 age group.

If the Northwestern researchers are to be believed, a significant number of them could have been in the range of 60 to 75 on the heart-health scale.

It here needs to be recognized that the number of Covid deaths for all Americans under age 40 was relatively small. It numbered less than 74,700 through June 2023 or about 29,880 per year from the February 2020 start of the pandemic.

Motor vehicle collisions were killing about 42,000 Americans per year – about 40 percent more per year –  in the same time frame, according to U.S. Department of Transportation data, and nobody batted an eye.

Americans largely accept that the carnage on the nation’s roadways, which continues on a daily basis, is the collateral damage that must be accepted to ensure they can get around as fast and as conveniently as they want in their cars and trucks.

They were much less accepting of deaths from Covid. Lockdowns were demanded. Vaccinations were proffered as a silver bullet. The U.S. military was ordered vaccinated. And then-President Joe Biden went so far as to order members of the country’s “special forces,” some of the fittest people in the country, to get vaccinated or lose their jobs.

The vaccine drumbeat was pounded long and hard, and continues to be pounded.

The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, one of the few organizations which talked reason during the country’s masking madness, was this week trumpeting the theme that “regularly updated mRNA vaccines targeting circulating variants remain essential for Covid-19 prevention and control.”

There is little indication that the vaccines do much to control the spread of the virus, and though the latest vaccinations have shown a reported effectiveness of 70 to 85 percent against hospitalization and 76 to 96 percent against death for those over age 65, all indications are that for those younger, physical fitness might be equally or more protective as a team of researchers from the University of California San Diego, North Carolina State University, the University of Texas Austin and the Australian Catholic University suggested in 2020.

Three years later, they published this analysis in the peer-reviewed Journal of Sport and Health Science:

“The conclusion of our 2020 research agenda paper still applies… ‘physical acvitiy (PA) has multiple well-documented benefits directly related to reducing impact of the Covid-19 infection itself, as well as helping the global population cope with the isolation and stress caused by the pandemic.

“‘Yet, PA is not being strategically nor systematically promoted to reduce harm from the current pandemic. Thus, there is an urgent need for research that can inform more effective PA policies and practices in the short-term and prepare global public health for better responses to future crises.'”

Say what?

Unfortunately, the fitness message still hasn’t gotten out despite the second election of President Donald Trump and his installation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy promised a campaign to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). It has largely ignored the issue of the sedentary lifestyle and focused on the food Americans eat and environmental toxins.

Still, a Kennedy’s suggestion that people could do more to ensure their own health was enough to lead CBS news to target him with a report that “MAHA rhetoric put health responsibility on individuals. Some patients feel blamed for illnesses.”

Apparently, CBS couldn’t accept that some patients are largely to blame for their illnesses. The reality here is that a lot of the responsibility for the country’s ill health rests on the shoulders of individual Americans.

Four years before the pandemic killed hundreds of thousands of already health-compromised Americans, researchers reporting in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings calculated that “only 2.7 percent of all (U.S.) adults had all four healthy lifestyle characteristics:

• “Being sufficiently active
• “Eating a healthy diet.
• “Being a nonsmoker
• “And having a recommended body fat percentage.”

The latter characteristic of being of a healthy weight has a clear link to the first characteristic of  “being sufficiently active” in a society where most people do not realize how inactive they have become since the machines began a takeover.

Carpenters used to spend their day swinging hammers. Now they spend it pulling the triggers on nail guns. Yard-care workers used to spend their days pushing lawn mowers and raking leaves. Now they ride the mowers and move the leaves with leaf blowers.

In a country where only 100 years ago, most people walked or rode a bicycle to and from work, the percentage of Americans commuting under their own power was down to 2.9 percent by 2022, according to the U.S. Census. 

The vast majority – 68.7 percent – were driving to and from work alone in a car or truck. And Americans wonder why their roads are so congested. Think of how much less congested those roads would be if everyone driving alone was on or in an individual-sized vehicle like a motorcycle or bicycle, or even in a Sparrow.

But, of course, this wouldn’t solve the problem of Americans losing fitness, which is what they did when they replaced walking with driving.

Thirteen years ago, National Public Radio (NPR) reported “Americans now walk the least of any industrialized nation in the world,” and Americans have only cut their walking back further since then.

Journalist Tom Vanderbilt was in 2012 writing about “The Crisis in American Walking” for Slate magazine and told NPR that “we’ve engineered walking out of our existence and everyday life. I even tried to examine the word ‘pedestrian,’ and it’s always had sort of this negative connotation – that it was always better to be on a horse or something, if you could manage it.

“Go to an airport, and look at people on the moving walkway. I mean, the engineers who built that walkway – it’s meant to speed you up, by walking on it. You’re not meant to just hop on it and go on a slow, sort of moving ride.”

Standing and sitting is, however, what people let the machines teach them to do. Just as they let the machines teach them that driving everywhere is the thing to do.

As a result, human hearts are paying the price. But hey, the wizards of medicine are getting ever closer to the point where they can replace that heart with a machine, and then Americans won’t have to think about exercise at all.

Except maybe for the connection between physical inactivity and various cancers, a connection that might explain the rising rates of cancer in younger Americans, which has the U.S. medical community asking “why” when the answer ought to be pretty obvious.

The medical community might be able to do something about this by embracing the now well-documented reality that “exercise is medicine” and spreading the message. But, instead some, maybe many, in medicine would rather rant about how “Trump Is Gutting Our Healthcare System” as if healthcare is a synonym for medical treatment.

It’s not. Healthcare is something that starts at home, and if Americans practiced more of it there, the need for medical care would be a lot less than it is today.