One of the greatest failings of our "modern" healthcare system is that there's no plan to address this crisis. Obesity is the gateway to what seems like an infinite amount of health complications - not to mention the additional burden on the health care system itself when they get sick. I fully acknowledge that it's a difficult subject, it upsets people, and it's uncomfortable. The greatest healthcare advice our leaders can give us right now is for everyone to exercise a little more and lost a little weight. Isn't this the perfect time for that? We're coming out of a pandemic and we have the actual data that showed that obese people were uniquely susceptible to bad outcomes from this disease.
>One of the greatest failings of our "modern" healthcare system is that there's no plan to address this crisis. Obesity is the gateway to what seems like an infinite amount of health complications
What are they supposed to do? Obesity is caused by American's terrible lifestyle. Healthcare systems can only do so much to compensate for a bad lifestyle. Stop drinking alcohol, and start walking everywhere instead of driving.
Poor health is extremely profitable in the US. From the food industry to healthcare. Drug addiction is profitable. There's little incentive to do much about it at a public level.
obesity isn't a crisis of the healthcare system, it's a cultural crisis at a macro level. You don't need 'healthcare advice' as if giving individual people recommendations has any meaningful impact, you need to tackle it a social level. Living designed around movement rather than cars, prices up on high calorie foods, nationwide exercise programs in schools, put a ban on all ads for sugary drinks like Singapore did, etc.
Obese guy here, we know. We don't really need the health system to tell us to drop weight (though of course, as a doctor inform us anyway). What we need is a sufficiently strong reason. Food is great and tasty, so we need a really good reason.
Mind you, everything is also more difficult as an obese person, so convincing me to lose weight so that I can e.g run better is really kinda pointless.
Doctors and the medical system can help with the issues around it, and manage the effects, but they are really the wrong place to solve it.
And no, the answer isn't making the streets more walkable (the streets around where I live are pretty walkable), or more places to exercise, since obesity is a diet thing.
And there is the issue, I think. The modern world is outstanding at solving wants by adding things. The problem is here you have to solve a problem by removing things.
I don't think this problem is solvable in the modern world at all, unless you are willing to institute calorie ration cards.
Obese people are simply a market for healthcare system. They have totally no incentive to do anything about it - will mean leaving tons and tons of money on the table.
Preventative healthcare kills repeat business.
Anecdata of n = 1 but two weeks ago I was hospitalized due to a stroke (IA).
I'm 38 years old, exercise vigorously for 10-12 hours per week, am a healthy weight for my height, have good blood pressure and cholesterol, and have zero known risk factors other than a COVID infection a bit under a year ago. I'm not ready to blame COVID just yet (we're still searching for an underlying cause) but my doctors and nurses all described a highly concerning uptick of strokes over the past few years, including for those like me who are generally in good health.
I was lucky to have recovered with essentially no noticeable deficiencies, but many of those with similar stories I've spoken with in the weeks since weren't so lucky and have permanent impairment.
(it's literally the same publication from the CDC, just a year later)
At that time, the CDC announced a dramatic decline in life expectancy by extrapolating one-year changes in death rates over the entire expected lifetime of someone born in 2020. This makes small differences look huge. But of course, that's not realistic at all -- we had a significant short-term change in certain age groups (mostly elderly).
When you calculate the impact on life expectancy without assuming that every year after 2020 will look just like 2020, the change is only a few days.
Low carb diet helped me with this. Calories in calories out, but if you have a lot of carbs you are going to get hungry when restricting the calories, whereas on a low carb diet I sometimes have to think hard as to whether I have had breakfast or not by 10am. Having woke up at 7am. "Oh I should probably eat something..."
I think I have less than 50g of carbs a day, and probably 1500 calories but I don't track it too closely. I also do strength, but a little each day and make it incidental. I might play with the TRX or do a few pull up or dips at the park while the dogs are off leash.
Something that makes it easier is there are low carb treats and drinks. It does mean taking in more alcohol (as in chemically an alcohol, not ethanol) based sweeteners, so I worry about that a little.
For someone who doesn't go out much this is easy, but in your younger years with social pressure it might take a lot of will power, and even changing your friends and breaking up with partners and so forth to support this kind of habit, since it goes counter to the average person's culture in the west. Especially quitting alcohol too.
Quitting alcohol and going to OMAD (one meal a day) helped me lose 20 kilos in < 2 months. And I wasn’t even obese, that was straight from overweight to goal weight. Alcohol is an enormous contributor to weight for several different reasons. Plus, the weight you get as a drinker (the “hard” fat) is the worst kind of fat your body can have.
A lot of success in fixing your diet comes from experimenting and seeing what works for you. Low carb can help some people, while particular carb-heavy but satiating foods like oats or potatoes can help others. I don't think it's always clear-cut.
“Healthy at any size” is a reasonable stance, and one in reaction to a medical system and social norm of being mean and hateful towards overweight people. BMI is not the only measure of health, but doctors will regularly tell heavyset patients with real other diseases to lose weight.
Fat people are literally the only group where it’s just OK to make fun of them, in many circles.
Even for those who are overweight and unhealthy, berating and shaming someone is never going to be a way to help someone heal.
"Healthy at any size" does not literally mean "obese people are as healthy as thin people."
I recommend reading the book, the entire point of which is about shifting one's health efforts from an exclusive focus on weight to a more holistic view.
I.e. even if you can't drop that last 20 pounds (and many people struggle to do so, especially as they age), you should still eat a healthy diet, exercise, limit alcohol intake and avoid smoking.
It's like not that there are fewer overweight people, they're virtually impossible to find. Today I feel like almost anywhere you look there are people with such problems it's affecting their gait.
I don't think it's constructive to blame the people that have gotten fatter. It really doesn't add up that all these hundreds of millions of people collectively at the same time lost their resolve and and willpower. Seems far more convincing if there are environmental factors at play.
The big wake up call for me was a few years earlier. I had just hit 130Kg (285+ pounds) and I had just had enough of it all! By the time I had COVID earlier this year I was down to around 90Kg (198 pounds) - I get the feeling that helped out immensely compared with how I used to be. Vaccines also did their part combined with the lessening impacts of the various variants.
The other thing that got brought to my attention was an off handed comment about various health issues that are impacting populations. Things like declining fertility and increasing health issues almost always correlate more with obesity rather than the environmental factors. Yes, correlation is not causation but it does seem at fairly plausible.
For example could things like micro plastics be doing these things? Yes. But one would expect these to be near global - yet the impacts are felt mostly in obese nations. It could potentially be a threat multiplier however.
The rise in obesity is likely environmental. It's entirely possible that microplastics or PFAS (or whatever contaminant you want to point the finger at) causes obesity, which then causes health issues.
Obesity can be an indicator of health, but I'd be careful about drawing the conclusion that obese people are dying at higher rates simply due to their weight.
When it comes to Covid, I'd bet on a physically active obese person having a better chance at survival over healthier looking people who aren't active, smoke, etc.
The good news is that maybe we got it backwards, in at least some of the cases[1]:
> Higher fasting insulin and higher c-reactive protein confound the association between BMI and the risk of all-cause mortality. The increase in mortality that has been attributed to higher BMI is more likely due to hyperinsulinemia and inflammation rather than obesity.
imo, one of the biggest causes of obesity is calories in drinks. sodas, juices, and alcohol are all incredibly easy ways to add a few thousand calories per week to your diet without filing you up at all. milk is slightly better (but only because it naturally has a much smaller serving size).
I am obese. I am a tall guy who had been athletic most of my life until moving into the corporate world and spending most of my time at work at a desk. I dont' drink or smoke. I am still quite active on the weekends and weekdays. I am in Japan currently so I walk alot.
But I've still been struggling for the past 8 years trying to lose weight and I even moved to Japan to try to put myself in an environment that generally has healthy food options.
By FAR the biggest impact I've found on my weight is coca cola and other sugary type drinks. Unfortunately I am addicted to it and have a really hard time stopping.
Right now I'm in a good spot, losing weight, and feeling pretty healthy and what helped immensely was Japan restaurants always having green tea and other healthy drink options so it could help me avoid drinking coke. I still love coke and I am always wanting that or dr. pepper or something similar. Whenever I go back to the US and go out to eat I really struggle finding drink options that are healthy and that I enjoy and its so easy to just order a soda.
I imagine that are millions of people that are like me - generally healthy but because they drink coke or other sugary drinks on a regular basis they are killing themselves. I am pretty sure that the obesity situation won't go away if people are drinking sugary drinks all the time like I was. It was super difficult for me to stop in Japan even when I was away from that type of culture.
Additionally there was another post here that I really agree with: "The good news is that maybe we got it backwards, in at least some of the cases[1]:
> Higher fasting insulin and higher c-reactive protein confound the association between BMI and the risk of all-cause mortality. The increase in mortality that has been attributed to higher BMI is more likely due to hyperinsulinemia and inflammation rather than obesity."
When COVID started I stopped going outside because of lockdowns and worry about my obesity and it really impacted my health. I started feeling much worse all the time because I wasn't' active and I became very sensitive to the food i was eating. I realized that my blood sugar was going all over the place depending on what I eat and I believe I had high levels of inflammation due to that. I then switched to a diet that balanced my blood sugar much more (Stopped eating pasta, or lots of bread, and other things that spike your blood sugar and switched to eating Kind Bars and mostly protein or green things when i felt hungry) and even before i started losing weight this made a huge difference in my standard of living and how I felt. I was still the same weight but my general health and concentration increased a lot and was one of the reasons I could start having energy to focus on losing weight.
I'm not overweight, I'm a double-vaxxed, very athletic (weight training and running habits) and I got nailed hard on the post-acute sequalae front. Dry cough, shortness of breath lasted over two months. I had to completely stop strength training as it's a known risk factor for long covid-inspired problems like mitochondrial dysfunction and dysautonomia. I had the latter and it was a deeply existentially displeasurable experience.
I got back into it not long ago and feel I've dodged a bullet, and learned a lot about how not to take health for granted.
That’s an interesting point, I wonder how much of obesity is contributing factor to consuming fast food such as cola or sodas and burgers etc. because McDonalds were around even in the 70s. Or perhaps the obesity is propagating through genetic changes passed on from people who started consuming fast food at mass scale only after a generation or two?
Obesity is to health what nuclear is to the energy debate.
A political side that:
dislikes universal medicine
dislikes decent city planning
dislikes pollution controls
dislikes regulating food advertising
dislikes government health info
dislikes taxing externalities like sugar
dislikes regulating medicines
dislikes harm reduction strategies for addiction
dislikes wearing masks
I could continue...
really doesnt want to talk about those things that they are obviously and provably on the wrong side of. So they've convinced themselves that their political enemies are all saying "being clinically obese is politically correct" and therefore they can get really upset at them for the problem.
Problem is, this is mostly not true. Their political enemies want to stop bullying, and victim blaming and people having body image issues because they don't look like a airbrushed Barbie doll or GI Joe on steroids. Which is good.
Their take on that, presenting it as a threat to health, is just deflection, and while I'm sure they sucked in a few misinformed but well meaning people at first, it feels more and more desperate, more and more deliberate misdirection as time goes on.
We have the web. We have access to academic journals. If the average software dev chooses to be misinformed on these topics then they're no better than a flat earther.
The article has figures backing up its claims. Do you have any evidence to support your statement that obesity/COVID have caused this decline in overall life expectancy?
Age is a multiple times larger risk factor for COVID risk than weight. So while weight is important, the real elephant in the room is an ageing population?
Very few people refuse to talk about aging, and it's not a problem we are equipped to solve or something unfamiliar to us as a species.
Plenty refuse to talk about rising obesity rates, and it's not only something we can address now but also a massive change (no pun intended) that has taken place in living memory.
You used the word literally four times in your post, and even twice in one sentence.
What's the fascination with this word? It seems to be used to add completely unneeded emphasis, rather than anything resembling its original definition.
I make a decent salary and so does my wife. We have two kids and we still don’t own a home. People I know who don’t work in tech are really struggling. There are multiple US cities without clean drinking water. It seems like the US is mostly in constant decline with a few elite city/states able to avoid the consequences.
As a result, people eat junk food, go to the doctor less, have more stress, drive everywhere, no mandatory sick leave or vacation in most states. We’re killing ourselves. It’s plainly obvious when you travel abroad and see how well other people live in their countries for a fraction of the costs and stress.
Diamonds are formed under pressure but bread dough rises when it rests… our society needs more time to make healthy food, exercise, and take a vacation…
Exactly. It's not just the money cost of buying fresh, non-processed foods either; it's the time cost of going to the store for fresh ingredients, cooking, cleaning... A single person caring for children and working two jobs inevitably turns to the convenient fast food drive-thru as a result.
Meanwhile, in a complete denial of reality, the IRS (U.S. tax agency) has just revised its life expectancy tables this year in light of what they claim is an increase in life expectancy. These are the divisors used to determine the amount of annual distributions for tax purposes that retirees must take from their pre-tax accounts (IRAs, 401ks, etc). And Congress also moved the required start date up to age 72 from 70.5, again in the direction opposite of that dictated by reality. (The point of the required distributions is to get all the pre-tax money out of the accounts and taxed by expected age of death).
"In general, since life expectancy has increased, the divisor used to calculate 2022 RMDs for a given age has also increased."[0]
Regarding excess deaths, Dr. John Campbell has an interesting video on the subject [0], mainly regarding Scotland but he talks about other countries as well.
Of course, as excess deaths increase, average life expectancy will reduce.
Seems many countries have seen a big increase in excess deaths, but thus far the cause is unknown. These 'cause unknown' excess deaths are not attributed to COVID, as COVID deaths are a separate category.
Life expectancy is computed as if the model person lived all their life years this year. This means that when e.g. a new communicable disease appears which is more risky the first time one falls ill, its effect on life expectancy is outsized: we sum up the risk from getting that disease _for the first time_ over all years of life. A year later, we sum up delayed effects of getting it for the first time, etc. The article doesn't seem to address that at all.
This is an artifact of the statistical model used to estimate the life expectancy. The model is called Lee-Carter [1], and it's basically a linear regression.
The last 2 years were outliers in terms experienced mortality. Most likely mortality will not stay elevated in the years to come. But the model does not know this. It simply uses these years to estimate how the mortality will evolve.
Now, one can say that some people will experience long covid, so their mortality rate will stay elevated for years to come. Fair, but that does not apply to people of age 0 (newborns), which is what this life expectancy number that's being reported is. For those people, the life expectancy will not be lower than before Covid, if anything it will be slightly higher (corresponding to 2 years of progress).
> The Covid-19 pandemic is the primary cause of the decline. However, increases in the number of people dying from overdoses and accidents is also a significant factor.
True statement but it should be the other way around. Deaths by overdoses are much more impactful in terms of life expectancy decline, since they mostly kill younger people.
One death from overdose is more impactful than one death from Covid, but if the increase in number of deaths from Covid (0 -> 400,000/year [1]) is much greater than the increase in deaths from overdoses (78,000 -> 100,000/year [2]), then Covid is the primary cause of the decline. Deaths from accidents also only increased 39,000 -> 43,000/year [3].
Let's say the average age of someone who dies from Covid is 75. Their life expectancy is another 11 years. [4] And someone who dies from an overdose or accident at 30 would have had another 48 years on average. There would have to be (400,000*11)/48 = 92,000 (rough math) additional overdose and accident deaths to come close to the impact Covid has had on life expectancy decline.
Careful there; that could lead to a conversation about the cost/benefits of how lockdowns were implemented.
Then we'd have to look at how younger generations were sacrificed for the older.
Then we might have to talk about how that happens in many areas, from wealth distribution to climate change policy, from environmental policy to corporate accountability. Not to mention the wars.
Can't be letting that type of discussion into the zeitgeist. Wealthy people might get upset.
The US didn't really do lockdowns; there were restrictions, particularly for international travel and to Hawaii, but people weren't confined to their homes as they were in other countries. Even in the more restrictive states you could always go out. But in many countries restrictions were much, much tougher.
The fact this is downvoted shows what an incredibly privileged life some people live. It’s easy to be all for lockdowns and shit when you own a home and make more than a quarter million dollars a year at your cushy work from home job. Meanwhile all the peasants expendable service workers out there had to keep on keeping on.
It requires an incredible amount of privilege to buy into the Covid narrative that got sold to people.
It will also be very interesting to see how mortality data trends during the next couple of years.
I know there's a cohort of people that are pointing out at a certain national level field experiment as the cause of increased mortality, but there are also very valid reasons why we would see an increase in mortality now. More data will reveal to which degree each group is correct, and thankfully, we have a robust control group.
> True statement but it should be the other way around. Deaths by overdoses are much more impactful in terms of life expectancy decline, since they mostly kill younger people.
This, of course, actually depends on the numbers from both (both ages and volumes).
The graph has a very clear inflection point from 2019 to 2020, overdoses were increasing for quite a while before that, so do you actually have numbers suggesting that the 2020 and 2021 impact of overdoses and accidents is greater than the completely-new-to-those-years factor?
As it turns out quality adjusted life years has been the gold standard for measuring this before 2020. In a fit of hysteria we decided to toss that out the window (along with just about every single other bit of human knowledge).
Imagine what would have been different if we used the industry standard way if measuring this sort of thing…
From the article, “The Covid-19 pandemic is the primary cause of the decline.”
And it is going to decline further. Covid affects multiple organ systems; the acute phase of the infection, it is safe to say at this point, is not the primary cause of concern.
Covid-19 infection increases the chances of a stroke 4x and of heart failure more than 10x, among other disorders, within 12 months of infection. [1] A chief scientist at the WHO recently said [2], “We need to prepare for large increases in cardiovascular, neurological & mental health disorders in countries affected by the #SARSCoV2 #pandemic.”
> For everybody or for some people? What is the causal chain?
The study it is based on is from Al Aly [1], who is using a dataset of (mostly elderly, unhealthy) veterans who regularly seek hospital care from the US government hospital system (VA).
It is an older, sicker population, and no, the results aren't generalizable. Moreover, his methods are dubious. I've dug into one of Al Aly's other paper's downthread [2], and the comments cross-apply. He has a bunch of papers using the same dataset and core methods, and they're all pretty bad, but the press loves them. Eric Topol is either ignorant of their problems, doesn't care, or a little of both.
As an editorial aside, Eric Topol really isn't a reliable source of information. He's pretty much on par with Eric Feigl-Ding at this point. He's someone who has surrendered all former scientific credibility to sensationalism. Even if you 100% believe every word in these papers, unless you acknowledge that they're a study of older, sick people, you're sensationalizing the results and misleading the listener.
Every significant disease can have longstanding impacts. Damage is often cumulative. Actual causation can come via many routes. One person might have diminished physical fitness due to weeks/months laid up with the disease. Another might have impact from various drugs/treatments administered during the disease. Others might come away with diminished organ functionality (heart/kidneys etc) that in turn stresses other systems. The "what doesn't kill you" mantra is just that. It isn't based in science. It is almost always better to avoid getting sick in the first place.
Do any of the epidemiologists/virologists who are saying this offer any thoughts as to why SARS-CoV-2 and the immune response to it are so different from every other novel virus which has emerged in the past? Is there any precedent at all for "a virus which reinfects you over and over with no reduction in lethality/sequelae from the repeat infections"?
Has there been anything published yet as to whether this holds true controlling for which strain of covid one is reinfected with, or whether one is vaccinated? I know at least one vaccinated person who's been reinfected with no symptoms at all the second time, and only knew because they had to get tested.
Readit News
Covid literally attacks obese people. And obese people also are at huge risk. I'm overweight and I was literally frightened during covid.
Now I lift weights every day and work on my diet very hard.
But we are literally ignoring the elephant (literally) in the room.
One of the greatest failings of our "modern" healthcare system is that there's no plan to address this crisis. Obesity is the gateway to what seems like an infinite amount of health complications - not to mention the additional burden on the health care system itself when they get sick. I fully acknowledge that it's a difficult subject, it upsets people, and it's uncomfortable. The greatest healthcare advice our leaders can give us right now is for everyone to exercise a little more and lost a little weight. Isn't this the perfect time for that? We're coming out of a pandemic and we have the actual data that showed that obese people were uniquely susceptible to bad outcomes from this disease.
What are they supposed to do? Obesity is caused by American's terrible lifestyle. Healthcare systems can only do so much to compensate for a bad lifestyle. Stop drinking alcohol, and start walking everywhere instead of driving.
Mind you, everything is also more difficult as an obese person, so convincing me to lose weight so that I can e.g run better is really kinda pointless.
Doctors and the medical system can help with the issues around it, and manage the effects, but they are really the wrong place to solve it.
And no, the answer isn't making the streets more walkable (the streets around where I live are pretty walkable), or more places to exercise, since obesity is a diet thing.
And there is the issue, I think. The modern world is outstanding at solving wants by adding things. The problem is here you have to solve a problem by removing things.
I don't think this problem is solvable in the modern world at all, unless you are willing to institute calorie ration cards.
I'd rather put the "failings" in quotes, instead of the modern. Contrary to it failing, it seems to be working rather excellently as business.
Healthcare has nothing to do with it. There is no medicine or medical treatment to cure obesity, it's a lifestyle issue
I'm 38 years old, exercise vigorously for 10-12 hours per week, am a healthy weight for my height, have good blood pressure and cholesterol, and have zero known risk factors other than a COVID infection a bit under a year ago. I'm not ready to blame COVID just yet (we're still searching for an underlying cause) but my doctors and nurses all described a highly concerning uptick of strokes over the past few years, including for those like me who are generally in good health.
I was lucky to have recovered with essentially no noticeable deficiencies, but many of those with similar stories I've spoken with in the weeks since weren't so lucky and have permanent impairment.
Are you vaccinated ? If so, before or after your COVID infection ?
Thanks
https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/25/cdc-one-year-decline-lif...
(it's literally the same publication from the CDC, just a year later)
At that time, the CDC announced a dramatic decline in life expectancy by extrapolating one-year changes in death rates over the entire expected lifetime of someone born in 2020. This makes small differences look huge. But of course, that's not realistic at all -- we had a significant short-term change in certain age groups (mostly elderly).
When you calculate the impact on life expectancy without assuming that every year after 2020 will look just like 2020, the change is only a few days.
I think I have less than 50g of carbs a day, and probably 1500 calories but I don't track it too closely. I also do strength, but a little each day and make it incidental. I might play with the TRX or do a few pull up or dips at the park while the dogs are off leash.
Something that makes it easier is there are low carb treats and drinks. It does mean taking in more alcohol (as in chemically an alcohol, not ethanol) based sweeteners, so I worry about that a little.
For someone who doesn't go out much this is easy, but in your younger years with social pressure it might take a lot of will power, and even changing your friends and breaking up with partners and so forth to support this kind of habit, since it goes counter to the average person's culture in the west. Especially quitting alcohol too.
Early on in the pandemic, the NY Times acted shocked, shocked that 7 members of this family all died from COVID
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/nyregion/new-jersey-famil...
As you said, nobody dared mention the 7 elephants in the room. In fact, the Times said:
> "But the virus’s devastating toll on a single family is considered as rare as it is perplexing."
Now I'm not saying we need to shame anyone, but saying "healthy at any size" is a terrible lie and in the long term helps no one.
Fat people are literally the only group where it’s just OK to make fun of them, in many circles.
Even for those who are overweight and unhealthy, berating and shaming someone is never going to be a way to help someone heal.
I recommend reading the book, the entire point of which is about shifting one's health efforts from an exclusive focus on weight to a more holistic view.
I.e. even if you can't drop that last 20 pounds (and many people struggle to do so, especially as they age), you should still eat a healthy diet, exercise, limit alcohol intake and avoid smoking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmWTHCHHzZY
It's like not that there are fewer overweight people, they're virtually impossible to find. Today I feel like almost anywhere you look there are people with such problems it's affecting their gait.
I don't think it's constructive to blame the people that have gotten fatter. It really doesn't add up that all these hundreds of millions of people collectively at the same time lost their resolve and and willpower. Seems far more convincing if there are environmental factors at play.
The other thing that got brought to my attention was an off handed comment about various health issues that are impacting populations. Things like declining fertility and increasing health issues almost always correlate more with obesity rather than the environmental factors. Yes, correlation is not causation but it does seem at fairly plausible.
For example could things like micro plastics be doing these things? Yes. But one would expect these to be near global - yet the impacts are felt mostly in obese nations. It could potentially be a threat multiplier however.
Being physically active looks to be more important than losing weight: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-022-01209-w
When it comes to Covid, I'd bet on a physically active obese person having a better chance at survival over healthier looking people who aren't active, smoke, etc.
> Higher fasting insulin and higher c-reactive protein confound the association between BMI and the risk of all-cause mortality. The increase in mortality that has been attributed to higher BMI is more likely due to hyperinsulinemia and inflammation rather than obesity.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-022-01211-2
Not sure I understand this sentencen. Are they saying hyperinsulinemia and inflammation are independent of obesity? Both symptoms of <X>?
I am obese. I am a tall guy who had been athletic most of my life until moving into the corporate world and spending most of my time at work at a desk. I dont' drink or smoke. I am still quite active on the weekends and weekdays. I am in Japan currently so I walk alot.
But I've still been struggling for the past 8 years trying to lose weight and I even moved to Japan to try to put myself in an environment that generally has healthy food options.
By FAR the biggest impact I've found on my weight is coca cola and other sugary type drinks. Unfortunately I am addicted to it and have a really hard time stopping.
Right now I'm in a good spot, losing weight, and feeling pretty healthy and what helped immensely was Japan restaurants always having green tea and other healthy drink options so it could help me avoid drinking coke. I still love coke and I am always wanting that or dr. pepper or something similar. Whenever I go back to the US and go out to eat I really struggle finding drink options that are healthy and that I enjoy and its so easy to just order a soda.
I imagine that are millions of people that are like me - generally healthy but because they drink coke or other sugary drinks on a regular basis they are killing themselves. I am pretty sure that the obesity situation won't go away if people are drinking sugary drinks all the time like I was. It was super difficult for me to stop in Japan even when I was away from that type of culture.
Additionally there was another post here that I really agree with: "The good news is that maybe we got it backwards, in at least some of the cases[1]: > Higher fasting insulin and higher c-reactive protein confound the association between BMI and the risk of all-cause mortality. The increase in mortality that has been attributed to higher BMI is more likely due to hyperinsulinemia and inflammation rather than obesity."
When COVID started I stopped going outside because of lockdowns and worry about my obesity and it really impacted my health. I started feeling much worse all the time because I wasn't' active and I became very sensitive to the food i was eating. I realized that my blood sugar was going all over the place depending on what I eat and I believe I had high levels of inflammation due to that. I then switched to a diet that balanced my blood sugar much more (Stopped eating pasta, or lots of bread, and other things that spike your blood sugar and switched to eating Kind Bars and mostly protein or green things when i felt hungry) and even before i started losing weight this made a huge difference in my standard of living and how I felt. I was still the same weight but my general health and concentration increased a lot and was one of the reasons I could start having energy to focus on losing weight.
I got back into it not long ago and feel I've dodged a bullet, and learned a lot about how not to take health for granted.
A political side that:
dislikes universal medicine
dislikes decent city planning
dislikes pollution controls
dislikes regulating food advertising
dislikes government health info
dislikes taxing externalities like sugar
dislikes regulating medicines
dislikes harm reduction strategies for addiction
dislikes wearing masks
I could continue...
really doesnt want to talk about those things that they are obviously and provably on the wrong side of. So they've convinced themselves that their political enemies are all saying "being clinically obese is politically correct" and therefore they can get really upset at them for the problem.
Problem is, this is mostly not true. Their political enemies want to stop bullying, and victim blaming and people having body image issues because they don't look like a airbrushed Barbie doll or GI Joe on steroids. Which is good.
Their take on that, presenting it as a threat to health, is just deflection, and while I'm sure they sucked in a few misinformed but well meaning people at first, it feels more and more desperate, more and more deliberate misdirection as time goes on.
We have the web. We have access to academic journals. If the average software dev chooses to be misinformed on these topics then they're no better than a flat earther.
I wonder why this is the top voted comment
Plenty refuse to talk about rising obesity rates, and it's not only something we can address now but also a massive change (no pun intended) that has taken place in living memory.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32566758
What's the fascination with this word? It seems to be used to add completely unneeded emphasis, rather than anything resembling its original definition.
just filter it out. we all have certain ways that we bias our communications. I certainly do.
As a result, people eat junk food, go to the doctor less, have more stress, drive everywhere, no mandatory sick leave or vacation in most states. We’re killing ourselves. It’s plainly obvious when you travel abroad and see how well other people live in their countries for a fraction of the costs and stress.
Diamonds are formed under pressure but bread dough rises when it rests… our society needs more time to make healthy food, exercise, and take a vacation…
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"In general, since life expectancy has increased, the divisor used to calculate 2022 RMDs for a given age has also increased."[0]
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliejason/2022/03/02/theyre-he...
Of course, as excess deaths increase, average life expectancy will reduce.
Seems many countries have seen a big increase in excess deaths, but thus far the cause is unknown. These 'cause unknown' excess deaths are not attributed to COVID, as COVID deaths are a separate category.
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[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wLu98NygrA
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The last 2 years were outliers in terms experienced mortality. Most likely mortality will not stay elevated in the years to come. But the model does not know this. It simply uses these years to estimate how the mortality will evolve.
Now, one can say that some people will experience long covid, so their mortality rate will stay elevated for years to come. Fair, but that does not apply to people of age 0 (newborns), which is what this life expectancy number that's being reported is. For those people, the life expectancy will not be lower than before Covid, if anything it will be slightly higher (corresponding to 2 years of progress).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee%E2%80%93Carter_model
True statement but it should be the other way around. Deaths by overdoses are much more impactful in terms of life expectancy decline, since they mostly kill younger people.
Let's say the average age of someone who dies from Covid is 75. Their life expectancy is another 11 years. [4] And someone who dies from an overdose or accident at 30 would have had another 48 years on average. There would have to be (400,000*11)/48 = 92,000 (rough math) additional overdose and accident deaths to come close to the impact Covid has had on life expectancy decline.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...
[3] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
[4] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
Then we'd have to look at how younger generations were sacrificed for the older.
Then we might have to talk about how that happens in many areas, from wealth distribution to climate change policy, from environmental policy to corporate accountability. Not to mention the wars.
Can't be letting that type of discussion into the zeitgeist. Wealthy people might get upset.
It requires an incredible amount of privilege to buy into the Covid narrative that got sold to people.
I know there's a cohort of people that are pointing out at a certain national level field experiment as the cause of increased mortality, but there are also very valid reasons why we would see an increase in mortality now. More data will reveal to which degree each group is correct, and thankfully, we have a robust control group.
This, of course, actually depends on the numbers from both (both ages and volumes).
The graph has a very clear inflection point from 2019 to 2020, overdoses were increasing for quite a while before that, so do you actually have numbers suggesting that the 2020 and 2021 impact of overdoses and accidents is greater than the completely-new-to-those-years factor?
Imagine what would have been different if we used the industry standard way if measuring this sort of thing…
And it is going to decline further. Covid affects multiple organ systems; the acute phase of the infection, it is safe to say at this point, is not the primary cause of concern.
Covid-19 infection increases the chances of a stroke 4x and of heart failure more than 10x, among other disorders, within 12 months of infection. [1] A chief scientist at the WHO recently said [2], “We need to prepare for large increases in cardiovascular, neurological & mental health disorders in countries affected by the #SARSCoV2 #pandemic.”
[1]: https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1564612325356670978
[2]: https://twitter.com/doctorsoumya/status/1564649057599078401
For everybody or for some people? What is the causal chain?
The study it is based on is from Al Aly [1], who is using a dataset of (mostly elderly, unhealthy) veterans who regularly seek hospital care from the US government hospital system (VA).
It is an older, sicker population, and no, the results aren't generalizable. Moreover, his methods are dubious. I've dug into one of Al Aly's other paper's downthread [2], and the comments cross-apply. He has a bunch of papers using the same dataset and core methods, and they're all pretty bad, but the press loves them. Eric Topol is either ignorant of their problems, doesn't care, or a little of both.
As an editorial aside, Eric Topol really isn't a reliable source of information. He's pretty much on par with Eric Feigl-Ding at this point. He's someone who has surrendered all former scientific credibility to sensationalism. Even if you 100% believe every word in these papers, unless you acknowledge that they're a study of older, sick people, you're sensationalizing the results and misleading the listener.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32671383
More data is needed, but it's looking like a key component of it is micro-clots: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02286-7
COVID-19 does massive damage generally.
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Can we have a statistical analysis for the lockdowns and curfews? Do incitations at being a couch potato have an impact on life expectancy?