If Trump & Chumps don’t completely do away with STATS-taking during their term, the RESULTS should speak for themselves re: reality of doing away with real public health protocol.
But will these ‘suggestion-gullibles’ want to ADMIT even extreme negative consequences to their own, or their children’s health?
During the Covid pandemic some dying patients used their LAST BREATHS denying that they had Covid … even during (nurse-held) phone calls to their relatives when they cd have been saying “I love you, stay safe from this bug.”
There are sequelae to all these ‘natural’ childhood diseases … ask chicken-pox /shingles sufferers decades later! * I now have had my 2 x vax after experiencing it in my buttocks & upper thigh - the jolts of pain felt like an electric cattle prod … and just think of not being able to sit for nearly a month! 🙄
* During an outbreak of shingles, exposure to the varicella virus found in shingles blisters can cause chickenpox in someone who has not yet had chickenpox … wikipedia.
The current, financially well-buffered & privileged admin will experience few of their public health failures — and they will likely try to not even allow proper stats gathering & treatment.
This govt, brought to you by 1/3 ‘gullibles’ Americana, plus racist/misogynist couch potatoes.
🔹Here’s what I wonder : WHEN will other countries begin refusing Americans entry when the U.S. epidemics resulting from these misguided 🙄 public health policies really start kicking in?
* The next Dem admin has SO much MAGA work to undo! Staggering idiocy.
Thanks for helping us understand the ‘thinking’ (gut feeling) behind this idiocy.
— now help us understand the admin perp’s ‘thinking’.
Thanks for all the thoughtful comments! Contrarian readers clearly care about their health!
As a lot of commenters have noted: I’m not suggesting that personal health behaviors don’t matter. (Though they matter less, relatively speaking, than I personally once thought - something I learned from working with public health and medical experts over the years.)
I *am* arguing that to the extent the administration focuses on lifestyle, their overall health policies get less scrutiny than they might. The public says “yep, that sounds about right!” And then we don’t talk as much about their major health moves like gutting the public health system or kicking millions off of health insurance.
And a friendly reminder that “lifestyle diseases” only get to be leading causes of death in the US because we have done such a good job of preventing “infrastructure diseases” more directly shaped by government policy. I’m thinking of leading killers of the past - from infectious diseases spread before widespread public sanitation to childhood diseases we now prevent through vaccination.
If you listen to the tech bros fantasy future, that is exactly what they want. Curtis Yarvin, the “philosopher” to the PayPal mafia has written and talked about “soft genocide” for the “unproductive” members of society and using their bodies as an energy source or composting them.
Diet, exercise, and general lifestyle DO matter -- a lot. That's not cultural bias. We in Public Health have been actively teaching people that for decades. While I get what Dr. Sweetland is saying, I need to state that up front. No way can we say that those things don't matter. Lifestyle is the major factor in the top causes of death -- heart disease and cancer. AND you don't need a lot of money and resources to improve things -- with simple decent food (beans and rice are cheap when you make them yourself), giving up smoking (which saves money), etc. But you do need some education (like learning how to cook, for starters) and control over your circumstances, a roof over your head for one. I fault RFK Jr. for completely distorting public health messages -- such as his turning the Food Pyramid upside down. Meat is expensive, esp. with current rising prices, and protein deficiency is not an American problem for the most part, though it is in some parts of the world. In modern times, chronic disease problems have been more the result of excesses and over-processing than of deficiencies.
Very few people - and perhaps almost NO Democrats, are speaking against the positive aspects of healthy eating and other lifestyle adjustments such as increasing exercise and quitting smoking on general health. This author certainly is not. But to say that making healthier choices is the “most important factor” in decreasing the incidence of cancer and heart disease is a bit of over-reach, to say the least. My husband and I eat a basic Mediterranean diet and exercise regularly, but both of us have a family pre-disposition to high blood pressure and cholesterol. Sure enough, we are taking meds to address these conditions. Is this our “fault” for not making healthy enough lifestyle choices? RFK and his ilk would say so - do you?
Oh, and I blamed RFK Jr in my first post. I did NOT say it's the fault of the individuals who have the health problems. For example, I know very well the powerful commercial factors in our society that drive people to eat more than they work off each day. But as a society we don't solve the problem by saying that diet and lifestyle aren't important. We KNOW they are -- and I gave you some examples. I mentioned smoking, saturated fat. Well, there are many other public health education campaigns -- promoting condom use is another one. These are all about choices people make that affect longterm health. It's about education and helping to remove some of the obstacles.
I was a public health researcher before I retired. The epidemiologic evidence going back many decades shows that high blood pressure is *not* inevitable with age -- even when there's a family predisposition. (There are also clinical trials and other evidence, but it's too much to get into it all here.) I know this firsthand because the predisposition is in my family, also, and my mother and her mother before her died of vascular disease and vascular dementia. But I had an advantage she did not -- which is that I knew what the research showed and made sure that I did all the things I needed to do to keep my blood pressure down (without medication). Successfully. It's a combination of things, not just diet alone. (For example, did you know that improving sleep quality after menopause through appropriate actions makes a difference in BP, too?) Likewise, there is abundant evidence that heart disease can be prevented with the right diet and regular exercise. Abundant evidence. Likewise, we know that many/most cancers can be prevented through diet, not smoking, and other lifestyle factors. The only reason this is not more clearly communicated to the public is that our health care system is geared toward diagnosis and treatment rather than toward prevention. Most doctors are trained in diagnosis and treatment, and in fact they often only get about one day of training in important subjects like nutrition. I've been present at some of those medical school prevention training days, so I know what I'm talking about. Despite the obstacles, health educators have regularly for decades done their best to spread the word. As I type this I have on my wall a big poster showing a large variety of fruits and vegetables, with the caption"Five A Day" which was mass produced and distributed by one of the cancer prevention organizations. Look, this is NOT my personal opinion only, it's been well known in the field of public health for a long time. And when the will is there, it works. Convincing 75% of the population to quit smoking -- starting in the late 1960s -- resulted in a measurable drop not only in lung cancer mortality but in several other chronic diseases. The drop in saturated fat intake after the peak in about 1968 was followed by a drop in cardiovascular disease mortality -- but more needs to be done. Do you think the rise in prevalence and severity of obesity hasn't had a big impact on national health? It has. Do you think that rise in obesity rates was genetic? It certainly was not. Yes, there absolutely are obstacles to improving health through lifestyle modifications, but that doesn't mean it's not important or can't be done. It already has been done, as I said, but more is needed.
While I agree with most all the information here in Julie’s column and the comments about health from the other posters there are some exceptions. I have celiac disease for example, and I cannot consume anything that contains gluten, the major protein in wheat, rye, and barley based grains that gives these products the texture they have—the ability for bread to rise and the fine texture of a bakery cake or some types of donuts. Nowadays there are more gluten free foods than there were even 10 years ago, many people follow gluten free diets because they believe that these diets are healthier than the standard food pyramid recommendations, but what they don’t realize is that there’s no FDA regulations on how much to enrich a gluten free food item, in other words how much of a certain added vitamin or mineral should be added to that particular processed food. Preparing gluten free meals on your own is a learning curve of its own, but explaining it to restaurant staff or managers is a totally different ballgame. Gluten free must be prepared with gluten free ingredients in an environment where cross contamination with gluten containing foods must strictly be avoided. Removing croutons from a salad does not count either because you would be leaving gluten containing crumbs behind on the salad. Like regular food allergies, any amount of gluten on a food is unsafe. This is the kind of thing that I have to deal with every single day of my life, especially if I eat at someone else’s home or go out to a restaurant. Celiac disease is an autoimmune disease of the small intestine that causes severe malabsorption of nutrients and malnutrition if not diagnosed early, but essentially must be treated as though it’s a food allergy.
Positive changes to lifestyle and diet are crucial, not only for the health of individuals but for the survival health care systems and ultimately the survival of society. Exercise is often the first prescription physicians give to combat a variety of health problems from heart disease to diabetes. 43 years practicing family medicine and pathology have shown me how often a change in lifestyle could be the best thing many patients could do, but it has also shown me that modern life (two working parents, high costs for essentials, and the intentional engineering of food to improve profit and make it harder for people to stop eating more “junk food”) works against the individual who tries to implement changes. The amount of funding required to run a health care system that is dealing with large numbers of patients suffering from preventable illness will never be available due to other requirements like a strong educational, military and infrastructure system. As we speak there are many people in countries around the world, including the developed world, who do not receive required treatment due to long waiting lists, financial barriers and societal pressures. To Make America (and many other countries including Canada) healthy again will require individuals taking responsibility for eating well, exercising, and pressuring governments to remove barriers to these changes. The changes in the current administration which move wealth to the most privileged and away from those needing economic relief the most only makes it more likely that these changes will not happen.
If Trump & Chumps don’t completely do away with STATS-taking during their term, the RESULTS should speak for themselves re: reality of doing away with real public health protocol.
But will these ‘suggestion-gullibles’ want to ADMIT even extreme negative consequences to their own, or their children’s health?
During the Covid pandemic some dying patients used their LAST BREATHS denying that they had Covid … even during (nurse-held) phone calls to their relatives when they cd have been saying “I love you, stay safe from this bug.”
There are sequelae to all these ‘natural’ childhood diseases … ask chicken-pox /shingles sufferers decades later! * I now have had my 2 x vax after experiencing it in my buttocks & upper thigh - the jolts of pain felt like an electric cattle prod … and just think of not being able to sit for nearly a month! 🙄
* During an outbreak of shingles, exposure to the varicella virus found in shingles blisters can cause chickenpox in someone who has not yet had chickenpox … wikipedia.
The current, financially well-buffered & privileged admin will experience few of their public health failures — and they will likely try to not even allow proper stats gathering & treatment.
This govt, brought to you by 1/3 ‘gullibles’ Americana, plus racist/misogynist couch potatoes.
🔹Here’s what I wonder : WHEN will other countries begin refusing Americans entry when the U.S. epidemics resulting from these misguided 🙄 public health policies really start kicking in?
* The next Dem admin has SO much MAGA work to undo! Staggering idiocy.
Thanks for helping us understand the ‘thinking’ (gut feeling) behind this idiocy.
— now help us understand the admin perp’s ‘thinking’.
Thanks for all the thoughtful comments! Contrarian readers clearly care about their health!
As a lot of commenters have noted: I’m not suggesting that personal health behaviors don’t matter. (Though they matter less, relatively speaking, than I personally once thought - something I learned from working with public health and medical experts over the years.)
I *am* arguing that to the extent the administration focuses on lifestyle, their overall health policies get less scrutiny than they might. The public says “yep, that sounds about right!” And then we don’t talk as much about their major health moves like gutting the public health system or kicking millions off of health insurance.
And a friendly reminder that “lifestyle diseases” only get to be leading causes of death in the US because we have done such a good job of preventing “infrastructure diseases” more directly shaped by government policy. I’m thinking of leading killers of the past - from infectious diseases spread before widespread public sanitation to childhood diseases we now prevent through vaccination.
It's awful when you feel like your own representative government wants you dead. I can draw no other conclusion. It is a regime of hatred.
If you listen to the tech bros fantasy future, that is exactly what they want. Curtis Yarvin, the “philosopher” to the PayPal mafia has written and talked about “soft genocide” for the “unproductive” members of society and using their bodies as an energy source or composting them.
They can have it. Fun future, kids.
In spite of the fact I have chosen not to have children, I would not wish the tech bro fantasy dystopian future on anyone.
Diet, exercise, and general lifestyle DO matter -- a lot. That's not cultural bias. We in Public Health have been actively teaching people that for decades. While I get what Dr. Sweetland is saying, I need to state that up front. No way can we say that those things don't matter. Lifestyle is the major factor in the top causes of death -- heart disease and cancer. AND you don't need a lot of money and resources to improve things -- with simple decent food (beans and rice are cheap when you make them yourself), giving up smoking (which saves money), etc. But you do need some education (like learning how to cook, for starters) and control over your circumstances, a roof over your head for one. I fault RFK Jr. for completely distorting public health messages -- such as his turning the Food Pyramid upside down. Meat is expensive, esp. with current rising prices, and protein deficiency is not an American problem for the most part, though it is in some parts of the world. In modern times, chronic disease problems have been more the result of excesses and over-processing than of deficiencies.
Very few people - and perhaps almost NO Democrats, are speaking against the positive aspects of healthy eating and other lifestyle adjustments such as increasing exercise and quitting smoking on general health. This author certainly is not. But to say that making healthier choices is the “most important factor” in decreasing the incidence of cancer and heart disease is a bit of over-reach, to say the least. My husband and I eat a basic Mediterranean diet and exercise regularly, but both of us have a family pre-disposition to high blood pressure and cholesterol. Sure enough, we are taking meds to address these conditions. Is this our “fault” for not making healthy enough lifestyle choices? RFK and his ilk would say so - do you?
Oh, and I blamed RFK Jr in my first post. I did NOT say it's the fault of the individuals who have the health problems. For example, I know very well the powerful commercial factors in our society that drive people to eat more than they work off each day. But as a society we don't solve the problem by saying that diet and lifestyle aren't important. We KNOW they are -- and I gave you some examples. I mentioned smoking, saturated fat. Well, there are many other public health education campaigns -- promoting condom use is another one. These are all about choices people make that affect longterm health. It's about education and helping to remove some of the obstacles.
I was a public health researcher before I retired. The epidemiologic evidence going back many decades shows that high blood pressure is *not* inevitable with age -- even when there's a family predisposition. (There are also clinical trials and other evidence, but it's too much to get into it all here.) I know this firsthand because the predisposition is in my family, also, and my mother and her mother before her died of vascular disease and vascular dementia. But I had an advantage she did not -- which is that I knew what the research showed and made sure that I did all the things I needed to do to keep my blood pressure down (without medication). Successfully. It's a combination of things, not just diet alone. (For example, did you know that improving sleep quality after menopause through appropriate actions makes a difference in BP, too?) Likewise, there is abundant evidence that heart disease can be prevented with the right diet and regular exercise. Abundant evidence. Likewise, we know that many/most cancers can be prevented through diet, not smoking, and other lifestyle factors. The only reason this is not more clearly communicated to the public is that our health care system is geared toward diagnosis and treatment rather than toward prevention. Most doctors are trained in diagnosis and treatment, and in fact they often only get about one day of training in important subjects like nutrition. I've been present at some of those medical school prevention training days, so I know what I'm talking about. Despite the obstacles, health educators have regularly for decades done their best to spread the word. As I type this I have on my wall a big poster showing a large variety of fruits and vegetables, with the caption"Five A Day" which was mass produced and distributed by one of the cancer prevention organizations. Look, this is NOT my personal opinion only, it's been well known in the field of public health for a long time. And when the will is there, it works. Convincing 75% of the population to quit smoking -- starting in the late 1960s -- resulted in a measurable drop not only in lung cancer mortality but in several other chronic diseases. The drop in saturated fat intake after the peak in about 1968 was followed by a drop in cardiovascular disease mortality -- but more needs to be done. Do you think the rise in prevalence and severity of obesity hasn't had a big impact on national health? It has. Do you think that rise in obesity rates was genetic? It certainly was not. Yes, there absolutely are obstacles to improving health through lifestyle modifications, but that doesn't mean it's not important or can't be done. It already has been done, as I said, but more is needed.
While I agree with most all the information here in Julie’s column and the comments about health from the other posters there are some exceptions. I have celiac disease for example, and I cannot consume anything that contains gluten, the major protein in wheat, rye, and barley based grains that gives these products the texture they have—the ability for bread to rise and the fine texture of a bakery cake or some types of donuts. Nowadays there are more gluten free foods than there were even 10 years ago, many people follow gluten free diets because they believe that these diets are healthier than the standard food pyramid recommendations, but what they don’t realize is that there’s no FDA regulations on how much to enrich a gluten free food item, in other words how much of a certain added vitamin or mineral should be added to that particular processed food. Preparing gluten free meals on your own is a learning curve of its own, but explaining it to restaurant staff or managers is a totally different ballgame. Gluten free must be prepared with gluten free ingredients in an environment where cross contamination with gluten containing foods must strictly be avoided. Removing croutons from a salad does not count either because you would be leaving gluten containing crumbs behind on the salad. Like regular food allergies, any amount of gluten on a food is unsafe. This is the kind of thing that I have to deal with every single day of my life, especially if I eat at someone else’s home or go out to a restaurant. Celiac disease is an autoimmune disease of the small intestine that causes severe malabsorption of nutrients and malnutrition if not diagnosed early, but essentially must be treated as though it’s a food allergy.
Positive changes to lifestyle and diet are crucial, not only for the health of individuals but for the survival health care systems and ultimately the survival of society. Exercise is often the first prescription physicians give to combat a variety of health problems from heart disease to diabetes. 43 years practicing family medicine and pathology have shown me how often a change in lifestyle could be the best thing many patients could do, but it has also shown me that modern life (two working parents, high costs for essentials, and the intentional engineering of food to improve profit and make it harder for people to stop eating more “junk food”) works against the individual who tries to implement changes. The amount of funding required to run a health care system that is dealing with large numbers of patients suffering from preventable illness will never be available due to other requirements like a strong educational, military and infrastructure system. As we speak there are many people in countries around the world, including the developed world, who do not receive required treatment due to long waiting lists, financial barriers and societal pressures. To Make America (and many other countries including Canada) healthy again will require individuals taking responsibility for eating well, exercising, and pressuring governments to remove barriers to these changes. The changes in the current administration which move wealth to the most privileged and away from those needing economic relief the most only makes it more likely that these changes will not happen.