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kswl2

Americans' Health LAST Among 17 First World Nations

kswl2
10 years ago

Published this past January, it is a stunning indictment of our society with respect to violence, our dependence on driving, and our healthcare (or lack thereof). I am wondering where the US will place on the next published list in Jan 2014. We have the HIGHEST chance a child will die before age five than Japan, Switzerland, Australia, Italy, France, Spain, Canada, Sweden, Austria, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, the United Kingdom, Portugal and Denmark. Read it and weep....

Here is a link that might be useful: US is DEAD LAST in first world health rankings

Comments (24)

  • Annie Deighnaugh
    10 years ago

    Our ranking isn't any better in education either.

    But we are first in incarceration rates!

    As Mark Twain said,

    Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.

    Here is a link that might be useful: US ranks 17th in education

  • kswl2
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    Thank you for posting that link, Annie. We've all been brought up on the "greatest (fill in the blank) in the world" myths. It's sad and hard to learn that very few, if any, are true. :-(

  • dedtired
    10 years ago

    Sad to see. I wonder if our ranking is affected by our size. You could put most of those countries together to make one USA. If you looked at only one wealthier metropolitan area in the US, where education and health care are more accessible, maybe the results would be different. I don't know. If you took out places like Appalachia, perhaps we would look better, but then again why should we take them out? They are part of the US and deserve better.

    I like that Twain quote.

  • kswl2
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    Actually, the article says the results were corrected for poverty, so even our wealthiest citizens have poor health and a shorter lifespan than others.

    One of my hobbyhorses has always been that our country is too big and too regional, and that it would do better for its citizens (and less harm militarily) if we were five separate countries, roughly correlating with the northeast, southeast, southwest, Midwest, and west. But that's another discussion entirely!

  • blfenton
    10 years ago

    Those countries all have some form of Universal Health Care System.

  • neetsiepie
    10 years ago

    And a lot of the westernized countries outlaw GMO and tend to eat less processed garbage than we do.

  • kswl2
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    On quora.com the question was asked -- what about the US do foreigners not believe until they visit. Many foreigners, both visitors and now uS residents answered. Many of the comments were positive, about our friendliness and standard of living. One post was sad, it said (I am paraphrasing) that his disposal ate better than many of the world's children. That's something to think about during this season of plenty, in a corner of the world where our economic health is based on how much stuff we buy.

  • 3katz4me
    10 years ago

    The first sentence says a lot - overweight and sedentary. That combined with our increasing lack of personal accountability probably have something to do with the situation. We've become a society of people who blame everyone but ourselves for our lot in life and think someone else (i.e. government and others) should fix most everything and we as individuals have little/no responsibility to do so.

    Our criminal justice system does go to extreme lengths to try to reduce how often innocent people are convicted - in which case more guilty people go free to commit more crimes. Not sure if I'd prefer the alternative though - where you're whisked away with limited rights.

    It's clearly an imperfect country but at least it's one where people are free to move out if they think it's better elsewhere.

  • gsciencechick
    10 years ago

    At one of my conferences this year hosted by the American Journal of Health Promotion, one of the speakers--actually most people have probably heard of him Dr. Michael Roizen (the "real age" guy), was talking about this.

    1. We are the most obese and inactive; therefore, we have the most health problems. Unfortunately, obesity is increasing even higher socioeconomic status groups.

    2. As a result, health care will become so cost prohibitive that any job than can be outsourced will be.

    He talked about some of the things they are doing at the Cleveland Clinic for the employees such as flex time to take fitness classes, the entire hospital and all surrounding facilities are a tobacco-free campus, and they don't even have sodas in vending machines. No sodas at all.

    I have two international graduate students. They love it here, but want to go back when their time is doe because they feel Americans work too hard, and it is bad for their health. Interesting.

  • kswl2
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    We pay for gym membership for our employees as well as health insurance.

    "It's clearly an imperfect country but at least it's one where people are free to move out if they think it's better elsewhere."

    Or, stay and make it better for everyone :-)

  • trailrunner
    10 years ago

    Here is a link to an article my son sent me . Not a pretty picture. c

    Here is a link that might be useful: 10 banned foods

  • gsciencechick
    10 years ago

    kswl, that is really exemplary for a small business. We discuss in class that if we asked that of most small businesses, they would look at us as if we landed from Mars.

    I am trying through my research and my service work with our community coalition to improve active living, access to healthy foods, and tobacco cessation. We've actually made some progress! It's slow but it's in the right direction.

  • kswl2
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    Thank you, gsciencechick. Our cost for insurance per year per employee is $6,540. Of that, each employee pays $1,820 per year of his or her cost. It's insanely expensive, but we decided a long time ago that we did not want to have employees if we couldn't employ them fairly. Other than the two of us, we have five employees... it is a Commitment, capital C!

  • palimpsest
    10 years ago

    Sedentery lifestyle and obesity have a Lot to do with it, and generally as a society, at least where I live, we keep resetting the scale for what "overweight" and "obese" mean. There is a lot of talk regarding the overemphasis on being too thin, but I don't see this in daily life.

    I was reviewing a history with a student who wanted to use her case for an accreditation required "special needs" (medically involved) patient.

    The patient was not yet 50, walked with a cane or walker and on multiple medications, most of which stemmed from the patient's weight.
    I asked the student if the patient was obese and the students said "No, not really, just overweight".

    The patient was female, 5 inches shorter than I am and weighed 100 pounds more than I weigh. She was Morbidly Obese by any real standards. When I said that to the student, she said "I guess you're right but I just compared her to the average person I see, not to a person of healthy weight." I take public transportation and some days I would say easily 75% of the people on the bus are technically visibly overweight and a there are always several people who are so large they take up two seats. It's definitely linked to socioeconomic status, because it's much cheaper to eat foods that make you fat in this country than it is to avoid them.

  • Annie Deighnaugh
    10 years ago

    I think the harder part of the issue is the cultural one...more is better, faster is better, cheaper is better. It's gotten to the point that even bed pillows are so fat that they won't fit our pillowcases. And ... no evidence ... but I believe things like video games have also led to a mentality of instant gratification...I want what I want, as much as I want, and I want it now! Also that there is no personal role to be taken, no effort to be undertaken and no responsibility taken for the outcome, discipline is out the window. Merely showing up is enough to reap full rewards.

    (On education, my GF is a prof of optometry...so we're talking professional level students...and one gal didn't understand why she was flunking...she said even though she didn't read the book, she carried it with her every day!)

    Supporting all of this, of course, is marketing that not only shouts at us from every screen (can you even avoid it any more? Even our gas stations now have screens that blare at us while we pump gas.) but scientifically designs foods and packaging and pricing in such a way that our innate psychology and impulse overtakes and we buy more. Work by Brian Wansink is amazing stuff that shows, even when people are educated about it...are shown the wizard behind the curtain...it doesn't change their behavior.

    Work done on epigenetics suggests our weight issues are only going to get worse as being born of an obese mother apparently makes your own obesity more likely so it becomes self-perpetuating.

    Then there is the visual effect. Our eye adjusts over time to what looks normal. I was watching a Doris Day movie last night and man she looked thin. Of course, that's what normal looked like back then. We are now growing so accustomed to seeing overweight people that normal weight folks start to look too thin.

    Then add in technology that keeps us sedentary. Remote everything. Everything at our finger tips.

    I don't know how you combat all of that without dropping out.

  • palimpsest
    10 years ago

    We had a student ask why she wasn't getting an A when she met the met the minimum course requirements. (Which is a C, not a D in the curriculum I teach part-time in). But that's a whole 'nother discussion.

    I am probably a bit obsessed and touchy about weight and I come by it naturally, my mother was thrilled that she lost the last of her steroid-induced weight on her deathbed, and I am not making that up.

    But I am touchy because at one point when I was getting my design degree while working, I had no kitchen, and I was vegetarian, I had gained a lot of weight, some 20+ lbs.

    When the kitchen was finished, I wasn't sitting and spending a lot of time on designs, I was no longer eating a lot of fast food, and gave up vegetarianism, I naturally started losing weight because I am fairly active--and I returned to what is considered middle of the normal weight for a person my size. (Hmmm technically for part of this time I guess I wasn't vegetarian because I was eating fish sandwiches from fast food places). But I was veg for other meals. Too much soy.

    Along with people telling me I was "painfully thin" (while a good 15 lbs inside my norm), I had someone want to speak with me privately because they wanted to know if I had cancer. This is how skewed perceptions have become.

    This post was edited by palimpsest on Mon, Nov 25, 13 at 10:45

  • blfenton
    10 years ago

    ~I lost a bunch of weight 4 years ago and have kept it off but an acquaintance asked a friend if I was sick. Yes, I was sick of being overweight.

    In this mornings paper is a very scary article on diabetes. I do understand that genetics can play a part in diabetes but for the rest of the people it's diet and exercise.

    Here is a link that might be useful: diabetes

  • Annie Deighnaugh
    10 years ago

    And lest someone think that this is obsessing on weight as the only health issue, in Japan, they use waist measurement as a predictor of health issues for insurance purposes.

  • dedtired
    10 years ago

    With all the recent coverage of the Kennedy assassination and photos and movies of people in the early 1960's, I was struck with how you simply did not see obese people in the crowd. I watched old home movies from the mid-60's and again, no one was fat. Now you look at a crowd of people and at least half are fat.

    I also think it is very geographic. When I go into center city I see a fair number of truly obese people.Some are walking mountains of fat. Out here in the nicer suburbs, you just don't see that at all. We have access to and mostly can afford healthy food and gym memberships. There is also a lot of social pressure to look a certain way, which is not a good thing.

    Odd though, because I lost weight when I worked in town. I took the train then walked several blocks to my office building, out to Rittenhouse Square at lunch and back to the train after work. In the 'burbs, unless I make a conscious effort to walk, I drive everywhere.

    It's such a complicated question, but better access to healthcare and getting rid of the ocean of crappy food that is out there would be a good start.

  • ineffablespace
    10 years ago

    I walk to work when I am out in the suburbs and I am literally the only person who is probably not a house cleaner or someone too poor to afford a car coming to or from the station --ever.

    People stop fairly regularly to ask if I need a ride, where am I broken down, etc, because the notion of a well dressed white person walking, to be blunt, is So Foreign that there must be something the Matter for me to do so.

    But where I have to walk is very pedestrian unfriendly--it's not made for walking either--I could easily get hit by a car.

    -----

    One of the negative reasons why people were so thin in the sixties is that so many adults smoked and suppressed their appetites.

  • Annie Deighnaugh
    10 years ago

    Smoking may have played a part, but in the 60s, nearly 60% of adults didn't smoke and still managed to avoid obesity.

    However, since then, we have had significant changes in diet including the amount of sugar and HFC in foods, portion sizes (the old coke bottles were 6.5 oz.) and the number of meals eaten out. Technology has also changed our daily levels of activity. Interestingly, we are also eating more meals and more snacks. This would be consistent with the fact that food is relatively far more affordable...the % of the average consumer budget going to food has dropped significantly.

  • sochi
    10 years ago

    Where I live (medium size city, Canada) you are more likely to see the very overweight in the suburbs. Urban cores have been largely "gentrified" (for better or for worse) and urban folks are more likely to walk or cycle to work.

    Geographic areas with higher concentrations of poverty or the working poor have much higher rates of obesity.

    Our obesity problem isn't as bad as in the US, but sadly we're closing the weight gap quickly.

  • Sheeisback_GW
    10 years ago

    I find it very sad the garbage they allow in and on our food.

    Ah yes. "Along with people telling me I was "painfully thin""
    You're healthy and someone thinks you're sick or have an eating disorder. It's awesome. (sarcasm)

    Since the new addition along with other reasons I've severly cleaned up my diet (DH isn't as on board), lost the remaining weight, and feel great. Even though I'm back in a good weight range now I'd honestly still like to drop another 5-8lbs. Having gestational diabetes during pregnancy...I sincerely just want to be healthy and weight does usually follow that.

    My issue is I've noticed people don't seem to be happy if you're not eating what they are! I'm now 'too thin'. I've even had someone ask me if I 'ever eat' when I politely said no to the food. It wasn't dinner time, I wasn't hungry, and didn't want what they were having.

    I'm also tried of people wanting us to jam junk down our one year old's mouth. He doesn't need to eat those cupcakes and drink soda, thank you anyhow. Seriously, you should see the looks I get and the comments when we repeatedly decline! The only thing I can come up with is they don't realize how damaging that stuff is. When he's older and actually understands 'special occasion' is that's different. I see no reason to taint his taste buds.

    I got off topic a bit but I just wish people would focus on their plate instead of mine.

  • magglepuss
    10 years ago

    I would love to see the world in better health. Far too much starvation and death due to simple fixes.

    In context to the world, maybe a decorating forum, seems a bit much to those who are starving.

    Yes, I take offense to telling certain groups what they should do and not do.

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