The answer is out there….

What if scientists created a medicine that lengthened lives, cut the risk of dying from heart disease by approximately a third, reduced the risk of developing cancer by more than a quarter, and showed -at least in the case of the new virus that drove the last pandemic – that the people who took the medicine had a nearly 400 percent better chance of surviving a previously unknown pathogen?

What if the medicine cost nothing to produce and thus could be made available for free to everyone?

What if the medicine had been studied for decades and shown absolutely no negative, long-term health consequences?

What if the medicine was so safe that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration didn’t require it be labeled with warnings of “thyroid C-cell tumors,” pancreatitis, diabetic retinopathy complications, acute kidney injury and acute gallbladder disease, which just happen to be among the warnings attached to Ozempic, one of the GLP-1 weight loss drugs now flooding American pharmacies as the nation wrestles with an epidemic of obesity?

What if the medicine was good for children and could be administered to them almost without their noticing?

If all of this were the case, wouldn’t a U.S. government that launched a full-court press to get Americans to vaccinate themselves against Covid and went so far as to order members of the Department of Defense’s special forces, among the fittest people in the country, to get vaccinated against their wishes, be all over promoting a medicine this safe, cheap and broadly effective?

Wouldn’t it be every day hammering away at the message that Americans need to take their medicine, and offering them tax-break incentives for doing so, given the economic costs of ill health in this country?

A sick nation

Unhealthy Americans now cost the nation more than $1 trillion per year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which reports that diabetes alone accounts for “$413 billion in medical costs and lost productivity.” Cardiovascular diseases, the nation’s number one killer, add another $471.9 billion in medical costs and lost productivity, and then there’s the $240 billion drained from the economy to battle cancers.

And yet, despite all of this, the administration of President Donald Trump, which promised to “Make America Healthy Again,” says almost nothing about the free-to-all medicine that already exists and could make Americans healthy again.

Then again, in fairness to Trump, the administration of former President Joe Biden didn’t do jack to promote the medicine, either, or the previous Trump administration. First Lady Michelle Obama at least took a shot at messaging on a small scale when her husband was president, but her “Let’s Move” campaign was aimed at the country’s little people – ie. children – who are now too often found to be growing in width as fast as they grow in height.

And one of the significant reasons for their getting rounder is their inactivity. They don’t exercise, and well….

Exercise is medicine.

“The evidence on the cost and health burdens of physical inactivity is overwhelming, and the evidence for the benefits of regular exercise in the prevention and treatment of chronic disease is irrefutable,”as researchers studying the medicine put it in a paper published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine in 2020. “Health care providers have an obligation to inform patients about the risks of being sedentary, and to prescribe regular exercise.”

Good luck with the latter. About the last thing American doctors want to do is tell their patients they need to get off the couch and move becuase their patients don’t want to hear it, and it is way easier – not to mention profitable – to prescribe drugs their many ailments.

As for the political establishment, it’s not going near the subject becuase a majority of Americans can now be classified as fat and/or lazy, and the politicians of today – both left and right – aren’t into telling their constituents things their constituents don’t want to hear.

The Europeans, to their credit, are least trying to do something about the steady decline in physical activity that has been going on in Western societies since motor vehicles started dictating urban design.  They have yet to register much success, but at least they have a goal – a 15 percent reduction in the proportion of inactive Europeans by 2030.

Many European nations now have “active travel” programs aimed at getting people to exercise by walking or cycling to work. And some offer tax breaks for those who document exercise or reimburse citizens for health club costs.

Blind to the risks

The big problem in getting Westerners moving, however, seems to be a philosophical one. Few want to accept that their lack of physical activity is making them unhealthy, fueling the explosion in chronic diseases, and encouraging earlier deaths.

The pandemic of the unhealthy didn’t even seem to get their attention, but then again the Anthony Faucis of the world, along with the American medical and media establishments, didn’t do a very good job of explaining why most peole were dying from Covid.

And the reason there was simple; they weren’t very healthy to begin with.

The universal problem when it comes to exercise appears to be that no one wants to accept this reality.

“Unlike tobacco use, which holds high global political priority, the global crisis of physical inactivity has not received comparable attention despite known commensurate consequences,” a team of U.S., Irish, Australian, German, Dutch, Norwegian and Kiwi researchers studying the problem reported in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Health earlier this year.

“Although (lack of physical activity (PA) is) a leading risk factor for non-communicable diseases (NCDs), its burden has been systematically underestimated in global health metrics,” they wrote, noting that a lack of PA is linked to “more than 5 million deaths annually, with an all-cause mortality risk because of inactivity comparable to smoking or obesity.”

The researchers went on to suggest a lack of political leadership is standing in the way of improvement.

“At a national level, a cross-government resolution for physical activity as a policy priority is needed through universal political commitment,” they wrote.”This could provide comprehensive, integrated and collaborative strategies to increase physical activity, such as those already applied to tobacco control.”

Good luck with that.

In the U.S. The last American political leader with the courage to say what needs to be said was the late President John F. Kennedy, and that was 66 years ago. The President-elect in December 1960, Kennedy took to Sport Illustrated magazine – the media ‘influencer’ of the time – to chastise “The Soft American.”

The belief 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,” he wrote. “But it is a knowledge which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting.”

Americans were already falling behind Europeans in fitness even then and Kennedy warned that the “harsh fact of the matter is that there is also an increasingly large number of young Americans who are neglecting their bodies – whose physical fitness is not what it should be – who are getting soft. And such softness on the part of individual citizens can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation.”

There was a brief improvement in the years that followed. The country witnessed a running ‘boom’ in the 1970s, and some benefits from that would accrue in the future.

In “A history of jogging and running – the boom of the 1970s,” Dr. S. Robert Latham would late observe that whena  group of researchers led by Duck-chul Lee at Iowa State University took a 15-year look back at the medical records of more than 55,000 people associated with the Cooper Clinic, the found that “runners had a 45 percent lower risk of cardiovascular mortality and a three year increase in life expectancy over nonrunners.”

But the running boom, despite the well-documented benefits, was destined to die in a society where making life ‘easy’ became priority number one. Americans were destined to become part of a “drive-thru” society where people did everything they could to avoid moving their asses under their own power.

Drive-in food dates all the way back to the 1920s, according to the American Automobile Association, but it wasn’t much until McDonald’s revolutionized the business in 1975, and today, drive-thru is everywhere.

There were “an estimated 200,000-plus drive-thru operations across the U.S.” as of 2020, according to Quantum Real Estate Advisors, with Americans visiting “drive-thru lanes about 6 billion times each year” to generate “70 percent of fast food sales which generates billions of dollars for the industry each month.”

And when Americans aren’t sitting on their ever-wider asses eating fast food in their motor vehicles, they’re sitting in front of some sort of screen watching or reading something. According to tracking data from Ooma, a telecommunications company, the average American (age 16-65) spent more than seven hours viewing screens in 2024, up from about six and a half hours in 2019.

Most of that time is spent sitting, and it plays a big part in the sedenary lifestyle credited with shortening the lives of more and more Americans.

“Screen addiction may not be taken seriously because it appears that almost everyone around us is at least somewhat addicted to their screens,” Ooma warned.

You, in fact, probably shouldn’t be reading this now. Go take a walk or a run or get on the bike or hit the gym. Your body will appreciate it.