This: > “Your health is only 10 percent influenced by the medical environment and maybe 20 or 30 percent in behavioral choices. And then a paragraph later, t

This: > “Your health is only 10 percent influenced by the medical environment and maybe 20 or 30 percent in behavioral choices. And then a paragraph later, this: “There’s a reason why the Southeastern portion of this country is called the Stroke Belt: It’s because the rates of stroke per capita are substantially higher there and mirrored by rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and other risk factors.” Cardiovascular diseases can be mitigated via diet and other choices. That's not sociopolitical. It's personal, and certainly more than 20 to 30%. Even in the areas with a higher life expectancy ceiling, that ceiling is lower than it could be. Regardless of where, we're eating and sedentary'ing ourselves into early and earlier graves. To frame it as these "premature deaths" are ok because other premature deaths are worse is a deceptive and dangerous narrative. Premature is premature and we shouldn't be rationalizing like this.