by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Donald Trump has selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services in his new administration, and the latter has declared that his mission will be to “Make America Healthy Again.” But even if Kennedy is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he faces a very stiff challenge in fulfilling that pledge.
Most Americans are probably not fully aware just how dramatically our national health has declined over the last few decades, and until very recently I was certainly included among the uninformed.
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Yet much of this decline has been easily visible to our eyes. According to research studies, about 74% of all American adults are now overweight, while almost 42% suffer from clinical obesity, along with nearly 15 million adolescents and children. These rates have skyrocketed during the last half-century.
Our national obesity figures are not only far higher than those of any other developed nation, but they are nearly double those for Germany and almost four times the rates for France.
Obesity is closely associated with diabetes, and nearly 40 million Americans now suffer from that serious medical condition, while another 115 million have prediabetes. Tens of millions have high blood pressure and other related illnesses. Once again, these rates have risen dramatically over the last generation or two.
These are huge numbers, with massive health consequences. Diabetes alone ranks as the eighth leading cause of death, annually killing more than 100,000 Americans, while being a contributing factor in 300,000 additional deaths. By contrast, the combined total of all our drug-overdose fatalities is a little over 100,000.
A study last year indicated that obesity substantially boosted the risk of death, potentially by as much as 91%, and with so many tens of millions of Americans suffering from that condition, the mortality impact has obviously been enormous. Partly as a consequence of these very negative trends, we spend much more on health care than any other developed nation, yet our life expectancy has generally been much lower, and stagnant rather than rising.
Everyone who has looked into these very serious problems agrees that dietary issues are the main culprit. But the complexities of that factor may be seen if we consider two meals, each totaling around 1,000 calories but otherwise quite different, one of them reasonably healthy and the other extremely unhealthy.
Suppose that an employee at a local health-food shop returned from a long day of knocking on doors for Jill Stein. He sat down at the kitchen dinette of his studio apartment for three servings of fruit yogurt, a pair of small Oats & Honey granola bars from Nature’s Valley, and two tall glasses of delicious all-natural orange juice.
