6 ms·

America Is Suddenly Getting Healthier. No One Knows Why.

38 points by ____H____ 2y ago

____H____ 2y ago
https://archive.is/9SXR4 https://archive.is/9SXR4
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  It wasn't loading at all for me. https://archive.ph/L1y3R https://archive.ph/L1y3R loaded but very slowly.
dartos 2y ago
Weird to open an article about health with traffic accident statistics.
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  They cite it within the « big picture » lifespan in the US, as an introduction. They also cite gun death in that picture. Health and lifespan are very probably very correlated in their readers interests.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    The CDC considers gun deaths a health problem. They have a National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. They'd like to study it, but have been specifically prevented from doing so (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment). That has expired but they are rarely allocated money to study gun violence.
    - aziaziazi 2y ago
      Very interesting read. It seems ok to study it but the results shouldn’t induce gun control advocacy. That’s crazy !! A dictator wouldn’t do better than that congress. > In a 2012 op-ed, Dickey and Rosenberg argued that the CDC should be able to research gun violence. Dickey has said that he regrets his role in stopping the CDC from researching gun violence, saying he simply didn't want to "let any of those dollars go to gun control advocacy."
- addicted 2y ago
  It’s not an article solely about health. Headlines are rarely about the article and more about getting you to read the article. People think of a headline as a summary but in reality it’s best looked upon as the most striking line in an article.
- quantified 2y ago
  Getting hit by a car is bad for your health.
- keybored 2y ago
  People who have not been in traffic accidents tend to be healthier. The woke liberal media might be too afraid to admit that but it’s true. Which is why I as your representative will make jaywalking a felony crime. Leave our poor cars alone! They’re just commuting to work as good, honest, Christian, hard-working hunks of metal.
sghiassy 2y ago
It’s probably because I started going to the gym last week
- ted_bunny 2y ago
  You're literally saving lives here, guess you can't quit!
- itishappy 2y ago
  Hey, congrats!
- sureIy 2y ago
  sghiassy is so fat that one week in the gym affects the national average
  - sureIy 2y ago
    For posterity's sake, this is a "yo mama" joke
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nc 2y ago
Instagram
nemomarx 2y ago
This just sounds like the end of covid era stats? traffic was weird during lockdowns, isolation might have contributed to drug cases, etc. for obesity ozempic availability has gotten pretty good and might cut into the margins?
Izkata 2y ago
> Take, for example, the decrease in overdose deaths, which might be the most surprising news of the bunch. (+ several paragraphs with theories as to why) This is the least surprising to me. The drop coincides with the end of lockdowns, which they don't propose as a possibility.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  It is endlessly and depressingly fascinating to me that we've had so much anti-drug propaganda shoved down us for so long that depicts addicts as monstrous criminals that seemingly as a society we're just unable to reckon with the fact that the best cure for drug addiction is just... being around other people. Not being isolated by circumstances, odd work hours, what have you. Just having a social life will not only keep you addiction-free but also enables you to use the same substances recreationally in a healthy way (sometimes, anyway, it's not bulletproof but it definitely helps).
  - hex3 2y ago
    [dead]
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    > the best cure for drug addiction is just... being around other people. Not being isolated by circumstances, odd work hours, what have you. Counterpoint: Most of the people I know who picked up drug addictions (all who have received treatment and currently recovered) picked them up from social situations. They encountered groups where drug use was their common weekend activity and you either joined them or you weren’t included. Being in between jobs or having a job with low demands was also an enabler of drug addiction. Idle hands and all that. > Just having a social life will not only keep you addiction-free but also enables you to use the same substances recreationally in a healthy way This generalization doesn’t hold at all. I haven’t heard of any addicts who became more moderate of their use of hard drugs when surrounded by other users of those hard drugs. The correlation goes the other way. Being around other users both enables and encourages more drug use.
    - 2y ago
jscott0918 2y ago
As I start to work with more genz folks, it is extremely pervasive that gym culture and health consciousness are much more core to their common zeitgeist than millennials. I imagine the same conditions core to their childhood and adolescence is also driving change in their parents and the rest of society. Growing up natively with social media seems like a very reasonable correlation for me. Your life and habits are always under a lens, self consciousness or conscientiousness make sense.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- eitally 2y ago
  This is absolutely true on both counts. For as much as social media is decried for negative effects on mental health and IRL socialization, healthy lifestyle & fitness inspos are absolutely having an impact. The nice thing about this is that it translates in obvious ways to IRL lifestyle mods, which when they show positive effects (better sleep, better skin, improved fitness, etc) become self-reinforcing habits. Among other things, alcohol consumption is way lower in young people than older generations, and although other recreational drug use is still "a thing", overall knowledge about the effects & impacts of recreational drugs is far more pervasive than in the past (as a young Gen-Xer myself, the prevailing mentality in the late80s-early90s was "drugs make fun times more fun" and that was about it). I expect lots of formal study of these phenomena in coming years. As a parent of kids 7, 13, and 16 who spends a fair bit of time around school campuses & youth sports teams, for all the whining and complaining adults do about young people, my experience is that today's youth are by far the most empathetic, compassionate and best adjusted yet. They're going to be ok (provided we can afford to educate them and then hire them into the working world).
  - mway 2y ago
    Genuine question: in your experience, does this increased focus on image create proportionate negativity in the form of e.g. increased peer comparison, superlatives (i.e. "I am/am not better/smarter/better looking than my peers") than your generation?
oldpersonintx 2y ago
if a bunch of very unhealthy people die off in a short period of time, the general public will appear, statistically, to be healthier
- quantified 2y ago
  Would the burst of deaths from Covid show up this way?
- magic_smoke_ee 2y ago
  Yep. We shouldn't give ourselves a pat on the back for nothing. If anything, we should be ashamed of the failure of pandemic pathogen containment and the needless deaths of 1.1M Americans.
  - dude187 2y ago
    Not achieving an unachievable fools errand isn't a failure. No matter what anyone ever did in any country would have ever had any chance of containing COVID whatsoever. Other than China in day one...
dfxm12 2y ago
the U.S. is rightly considered a “rich death trap” for its young and middle-aged citizens... Our purchasing power is declining, vis a vis wages not keeping up with inflation and in some cases falling [0]. It follows that if we aren't as rich as we used to be, we're falling into less of a "rich death trap". 0 - https://moneywise.com/research/americans-purchasing-power-plummets-as-inflation-slashes-salaries https://moneywise.com/research/americans-purchasing-power-pl...
- ajross 2y ago
  That's a terrible article. Most of the numbers[1] are "last five years", which is a huge cherry pick right around the pandemic. It's true that there was an savings and inflation burst 2021-2023! But drawing your box around it and declaring "things are getting worse" instead of looking at the trend in both directions is just bad science. As always, ask FRED, not random clickbait articles. Real (which means "inflation-adjusted") median household income in the United States: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N It's been going steadily upward since 2011, and is currently, except for the 2020-22 correction the article is cherry picking. [1] Also the headline isn't an aggregate number measuring people, it's citing "97% of professions". Wat? What does that even mean? Is there a formal list out there of all the "professions" such that you can count them all? Clearly there is not, so that number become non-falsifiable.
- lkbm 2y ago
  Is there some Simpsons paradox/composition effect thing going on here, or something with PPP vs. real wages? For full-time employees, real wages are up[0][1], especially for the bottom quartile[2]. Overall median income appears to be down from 2019[3][4]. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881900Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881900Q [2] https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/ https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/ [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N [4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
shin_lao 2y ago
Covid stats skewed everything. This article isn't very rigorous.
- zusammen 2y ago
  [dead]
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  The article should be comparing 2023 per-capita mortality rates with 2019.
pif 2y ago
I hope the reason is not that so many persons died prematurely that the natural rate of illness is not sufficient to replacer them in the statistics.
francisofascii 2y ago
Based on the decline in the following: overdose deaths traffic fatalities adult-obesity rate murder rate
Aurornis 2y ago
The obesity decline is obviously related to the widespread use of GLP-1 drugs. The article mentions this halfway down but pretends that it’s still a big mystery. Obesity and lifespan are favorite topics of people lamenting America as a whole but articles like these one always avoid the elephant in the room: Obesity and lifespan are very region-specific in the United States. If you live in the south you’ll have access to some great food, but the average lifespan is substantially lower. The decline in drug deaths could be related to a growing wariness over fentanyl. Fentanyl was popular for a while with opioid seekers who wanted the cheapest option, but many of them are sadly dying off and new drug users know better to avoid it. Most of the news reports are about accidental fentanyl contamination, but the scary reality is that fentanyl was being actively sought out by many opioid seekers. Some of the other stats feel like a return to normalcy after the COVID strange times, which the article mentions.
- op00to 2y ago
  > The obesity decline is obviously related to the widespread use of GLP-1 drugs. All I have to offer is anecdotes, but as someone who is currently on a GLP-1 RA, when I've talked about my experience it seems like most people are totally unaware of them other than the fact that they exist. It's possible people are embarrassed to admit they're using GLP-1 RAs. Combined with the challenge of getting insurance to cover this, it seems like most people who could benefit from these drugs are not using them. I think there's a contribution for sure, but I also see in my own life people who would previously have gotten a cheeseburger when eating out choosing a salad.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    You only need a small number of people taking GLP-1 drugs to see the overall obesity rate go down. As far as drugs go, GLP-1 drugs are extremely popular for how young they are. As the article mentions, 1 in 8 people have been prescribed them at some point. Regardless of what you’ve heard personally, that’s a huge number of people! Definitely enough to start showing up as a couple points reduction in obesity rate.
    - 2y ago
ck2 2y ago
er, 2 million people in America died as excessive death since 2020 that will mess with averages a bit I mean AT LEAST two million, they don't like to report covid as cause of death anymore but rather the symptoms like death from excessive pneumonia
readthenotes1 2y ago
"Also in September, FBI analysis confirmed a double-digit decline in the national murder rate." Was this before or after they added in all the murders that weren't reported to the FBI? https://crimeresearch.org/2024/04/how-reliable-are-the-fbis-report-of-violent-crime-data-there-are-some-major-problems/ https://crimeresearch.org/2024/04/how-reliable-are-the-fbis-...
undebuggable 2y ago
Well... congratulations?
WaitWaitWha 2y ago
I read the article, but on re-read, I gave up after the first few paragraphs of lazy journalism. > gun violence, no reference link > drug overdoses Reasonable reference link although the data ends at 2020. > auto accidents Links to an X post of IHME chart. Why not just link to the original IHME data? Data stops at 2019. > America’s unusually short lifespans The referenced data is "Child and Infant Mortality", and again till 2020. > U.S. government reported that drug-overdose deaths fell 3 percent from 2022 to 2023. Following the link to the data, each single state where there was significant drop is * as "*Underreported due to incomplete data." For example, North Carolina drug OD "dropped" 49.34% yoy. Not only that the data source has it on the top in large, framed box "Some states currently have longer than usual delays in reporting drug overdose deaths." I really want this to be true, but after this, I am not convinced.
- pipeline_peak 2y ago
  Do you really need a reference on gun violence?
  - gruez 2y ago
    I think he's questioning whether those factors changed, not whether those factors contribute to deaths. The claim of the article after all, is that life expectancy has risen.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
    In order to judge the merits of the argument it is helpful to understand why certain points are made so journalists will usually provide some citation which justifies their claims. It doesn’t help the argument to provide bad references, let alone to not bother with a reference.
  - anthony_d 2y ago
    Yes. The overwhelming majority of gun violence are suicides, so real data is a great proxy for things that are harder to track.
- freddealmeida 2y ago
discardedrefuse 2y ago
I can't imagine you'll find a single reason for this. There was an study this week about the decrease in drug and alcohol use amongst young people. Which I'm sure is just one of many contributing factors. https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/12/the-kids-are-maybe-alright-teen-drug-use-hits-new-lows-in-ongoing-decline/ https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/12/the-kids-are-maybe-al... Maybe that was covered in the article, but it's paywalled so I couldn't read passed the free intro paragraphs. And with such a click-baity title, I wouldn't want to anyways.
jejeyyy77 2y ago
cause trump
bsder 2y ago
It's almost certainly ozempic/semaglutide combined with mortality die offs from Covid/drug addiction/etc. Statins had a similarly large effect when they came online.
hattmall 2y ago
It seems that very little of that has anything to do with health. It also seems like the declines are all from the recent COVID induced surges. Have we declined in any of those metrics from 2019 levels? The only one really healthy related is obesity, likely from the combination of GLP-1 and COVID killing obese people. Every decade there is a weight loss miracle cure and everytime we see an outbreak of the side effects a few years later. So it's hard pressed to call a medication induced decline in obesity "healthy". Anecdotally the few people I know that have experienced significant weight loss from Ozempic look anything but healthy.
tzs 2y ago
> In September, the U.S. government announced that the adult-obesity rate had declined in its most recent count, which ended in August 2023. The word "announced" is a link to this [1]. I'm failing to see in that where the rate has declined. According to the "key findings" section of that document, > From 2013–2014 through August 2021–August 2023, the age-adjusted prevalence of obesity did not change significantly, while severe obesity prevalence increased from 7.7% to 9.7%. Later it adds, > Changes in the prevalence of obesity and severe obesity between the two most recent survey cycles, 2017–March 2020 and August 2021–August 2023, were not significant. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db508.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db508.htm
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Terrible clickbait title that doesn’t reflect the actual findings.
magic_smoke_ee 2y ago
Important nit: It's best to refer to the GLP-1 medication semaglutide for obesity as Wegovy. Ozempic isn't for obesity but it may cause some weight loss as a side-effect because it's for diabetes and it's a lower dose. Wegovy is the dosage and product for obesity. Medicare covers Ozempic but not Wegovy.
Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
Is there a rule coined yet about headlines that have 'No one knows why' in the title. Like the Betteridge's law: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." In some cases its true, others its used kinda weakly like we don't know for sure, but there are plausible theories, and in other cases its full wrong, like we do know, its just that the journalist just asked their uber driver on the way home from the bar and they didn't know so research complete go with the headline.

38 points by ____H____ 2y ago

____H____ 2y ago

https://archive.is/9SXR4 https://archive.is/9SXR4

OutOfHere 2y ago
It wasn't loading at all for me. https://archive.ph/L1y3R https://archive.ph/L1y3R loaded but very slowly.

dartos 2y ago

Weird to open an article about health with traffic accident statistics.

aziaziazi 2y ago
They cite it within the « big picture » lifespan in the US, as an introduction. They also cite gun death in that picture. Health and lifespan are very probably very correlated in their readers interests.
- jfengel 2y ago
  The CDC considers gun deaths a health problem. They have a National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. They'd like to study it, but have been specifically prevented from doing so (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment). That has expired but they are rarely allocated money to study gun violence.
  - aziaziazi 2y ago
    Very interesting read. It seems ok to study it but the results shouldn’t induce gun control advocacy. That’s crazy !! A dictator wouldn’t do better than that congress. > In a 2012 op-ed, Dickey and Rosenberg argued that the CDC should be able to research gun violence. Dickey has said that he regrets his role in stopping the CDC from researching gun violence, saying he simply didn't want to "let any of those dollars go to gun control advocacy."
addicted 2y ago
It’s not an article solely about health. Headlines are rarely about the article and more about getting you to read the article. People think of a headline as a summary but in reality it’s best looked upon as the most striking line in an article.
quantified 2y ago
Getting hit by a car is bad for your health.
keybored 2y ago
People who have not been in traffic accidents tend to be healthier. The woke liberal media might be too afraid to admit that but it’s true. Which is why I as your representative will make jaywalking a felony crime. Leave our poor cars alone! They’re just commuting to work as good, honest, Christian, hard-working hunks of metal.

sghiassy 2y ago

It’s probably because I started going to the gym last week

ted_bunny 2y ago
You're literally saving lives here, guess you can't quit!
itishappy 2y ago
Hey, congrats!
sureIy 2y ago
sghiassy is so fat that one week in the gym affects the national average
- sureIy 2y ago
  For posterity's sake, this is a "yo mama" joke

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nc 2y ago

Instagram

nemomarx 2y ago

This just sounds like the end of covid era stats? traffic was weird during lockdowns, isolation might have contributed to drug cases, etc. for obesity ozempic availability has gotten pretty good and might cut into the margins?

Izkata 2y ago

> Take, for example, the decrease in overdose deaths, which might be the most surprising news of the bunch. (+ several paragraphs with theories as to why) This is the least surprising to me. The drop coincides with the end of lockdowns, which they don't propose as a possibility.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
It is endlessly and depressingly fascinating to me that we've had so much anti-drug propaganda shoved down us for so long that depicts addicts as monstrous criminals that seemingly as a society we're just unable to reckon with the fact that the best cure for drug addiction is just... being around other people. Not being isolated by circumstances, odd work hours, what have you. Just having a social life will not only keep you addiction-free but also enables you to use the same substances recreationally in a healthy way (sometimes, anyway, it's not bulletproof but it definitely helps).
- hex3 2y ago
  [dead]
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > the best cure for drug addiction is just... being around other people. Not being isolated by circumstances, odd work hours, what have you. Counterpoint: Most of the people I know who picked up drug addictions (all who have received treatment and currently recovered) picked them up from social situations. They encountered groups where drug use was their common weekend activity and you either joined them or you weren’t included. Being in between jobs or having a job with low demands was also an enabler of drug addiction. Idle hands and all that. > Just having a social life will not only keep you addiction-free but also enables you to use the same substances recreationally in a healthy way This generalization doesn’t hold at all. I haven’t heard of any addicts who became more moderate of their use of hard drugs when surrounded by other users of those hard drugs. The correlation goes the other way. Being around other users both enables and encourages more drug use.
  - 2y ago

jscott0918 2y ago

As I start to work with more genz folks, it is extremely pervasive that gym culture and health consciousness are much more core to their common zeitgeist than millennials. I imagine the same conditions core to their childhood and adolescence is also driving change in their parents and the rest of society. Growing up natively with social media seems like a very reasonable correlation for me. Your life and habits are always under a lens, self consciousness or conscientiousness make sense.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
eitally 2y ago
This is absolutely true on both counts. For as much as social media is decried for negative effects on mental health and IRL socialization, healthy lifestyle & fitness inspos are absolutely having an impact. The nice thing about this is that it translates in obvious ways to IRL lifestyle mods, which when they show positive effects (better sleep, better skin, improved fitness, etc) become self-reinforcing habits. Among other things, alcohol consumption is way lower in young people than older generations, and although other recreational drug use is still "a thing", overall knowledge about the effects & impacts of recreational drugs is far more pervasive than in the past (as a young Gen-Xer myself, the prevailing mentality in the late80s-early90s was "drugs make fun times more fun" and that was about it). I expect lots of formal study of these phenomena in coming years. As a parent of kids 7, 13, and 16 who spends a fair bit of time around school campuses & youth sports teams, for all the whining and complaining adults do about young people, my experience is that today's youth are by far the most empathetic, compassionate and best adjusted yet. They're going to be ok (provided we can afford to educate them and then hire them into the working world).
- mway 2y ago
  Genuine question: in your experience, does this increased focus on image create proportionate negativity in the form of e.g. increased peer comparison, superlatives (i.e. "I am/am not better/smarter/better looking than my peers") than your generation?

oldpersonintx 2y ago

if a bunch of very unhealthy people die off in a short period of time, the general public will appear, statistically, to be healthier

quantified 2y ago
Would the burst of deaths from Covid show up this way?
magic_smoke_ee 2y ago
Yep. We shouldn't give ourselves a pat on the back for nothing. If anything, we should be ashamed of the failure of pandemic pathogen containment and the needless deaths of 1.1M Americans.
- dude187 2y ago
  Not achieving an unachievable fools errand isn't a failure. No matter what anyone ever did in any country would have ever had any chance of containing COVID whatsoever. Other than China in day one...

dfxm12 2y ago

the U.S. is rightly considered a “rich death trap” for its young and middle-aged citizens... Our purchasing power is declining, vis a vis wages not keeping up with inflation and in some cases falling [0]. It follows that if we aren't as rich as we used to be, we're falling into less of a "rich death trap". 0 - https://moneywise.com/research/americans-purchasing-power-plummets-as-inflation-slashes-salaries https://moneywise.com/research/americans-purchasing-power-pl...

ajross 2y ago
That's a terrible article. Most of the numbers[1] are "last five years", which is a huge cherry pick right around the pandemic. It's true that there was an savings and inflation burst 2021-2023! But drawing your box around it and declaring "things are getting worse" instead of looking at the trend in both directions is just bad science. As always, ask FRED, not random clickbait articles. Real (which means "inflation-adjusted") median household income in the United States: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N It's been going steadily upward since 2011, and is currently, except for the 2020-22 correction the article is cherry picking. [1] Also the headline isn't an aggregate number measuring people, it's citing "97% of professions". Wat? What does that even mean? Is there a formal list out there of all the "professions" such that you can count them all? Clearly there is not, so that number become non-falsifiable.
lkbm 2y ago
Is there some Simpsons paradox/composition effect thing going on here, or something with PPP vs. real wages? For full-time employees, real wages are up[0][1], especially for the bottom quartile[2]. Overall median income appears to be down from 2019[3][4]. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881900Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881900Q [2] https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/ https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/ [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N [4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

shin_lao 2y ago

Covid stats skewed everything. This article isn't very rigorous.

zusammen 2y ago
[dead]
insane_dreamer 2y ago
The article should be comparing 2023 per-capita mortality rates with 2019.

pif 2y ago

I hope the reason is not that so many persons died prematurely that the natural rate of illness is not sufficient to replacer them in the statistics.

francisofascii 2y ago

Based on the decline in the following: overdose deaths traffic fatalities adult-obesity rate murder rate

Aurornis 2y ago

The obesity decline is obviously related to the widespread use of GLP-1 drugs. The article mentions this halfway down but pretends that it’s still a big mystery. Obesity and lifespan are favorite topics of people lamenting America as a whole but articles like these one always avoid the elephant in the room: Obesity and lifespan are very region-specific in the United States. If you live in the south you’ll have access to some great food, but the average lifespan is substantially lower. The decline in drug deaths could be related to a growing wariness over fentanyl. Fentanyl was popular for a while with opioid seekers who wanted the cheapest option, but many of them are sadly dying off and new drug users know better to avoid it. Most of the news reports are about accidental fentanyl contamination, but the scary reality is that fentanyl was being actively sought out by many opioid seekers. Some of the other stats feel like a return to normalcy after the COVID strange times, which the article mentions.

op00to 2y ago
> The obesity decline is obviously related to the widespread use of GLP-1 drugs. All I have to offer is anecdotes, but as someone who is currently on a GLP-1 RA, when I've talked about my experience it seems like most people are totally unaware of them other than the fact that they exist. It's possible people are embarrassed to admit they're using GLP-1 RAs. Combined with the challenge of getting insurance to cover this, it seems like most people who could benefit from these drugs are not using them. I think there's a contribution for sure, but I also see in my own life people who would previously have gotten a cheeseburger when eating out choosing a salad.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  You only need a small number of people taking GLP-1 drugs to see the overall obesity rate go down. As far as drugs go, GLP-1 drugs are extremely popular for how young they are. As the article mentions, 1 in 8 people have been prescribed them at some point. Regardless of what you’ve heard personally, that’s a huge number of people! Definitely enough to start showing up as a couple points reduction in obesity rate.
  - 2y ago

ck2 2y ago

er, 2 million people in America died as excessive death since 2020 that will mess with averages a bit I mean AT LEAST two million, they don't like to report covid as cause of death anymore but rather the symptoms like death from excessive pneumonia

readthenotes1 2y ago

"Also in September, FBI analysis confirmed a double-digit decline in the national murder rate." Was this before or after they added in all the murders that weren't reported to the FBI? https://crimeresearch.org/2024/04/how-reliable-are-the-fbis-report-of-violent-crime-data-there-are-some-major-problems/ https://crimeresearch.org/2024/04/how-reliable-are-the-fbis-...

undebuggable 2y ago

Well... congratulations?

WaitWaitWha 2y ago

I read the article, but on re-read, I gave up after the first few paragraphs of lazy journalism. > gun violence, no reference link > drug overdoses Reasonable reference link although the data ends at 2020. > auto accidents Links to an X post of IHME chart. Why not just link to the original IHME data? Data stops at 2019. > America’s unusually short lifespans The referenced data is "Child and Infant Mortality", and again till 2020. > U.S. government reported that drug-overdose deaths fell 3 percent from 2022 to 2023. Following the link to the data, each single state where there was significant drop is * as "*Underreported due to incomplete data." For example, North Carolina drug OD "dropped" 49.34% yoy. Not only that the data source has it on the top in large, framed box "Some states currently have longer than usual delays in reporting drug overdose deaths." I really want this to be true, but after this, I am not convinced.

pipeline_peak 2y ago
Do you really need a reference on gun violence?
- gruez 2y ago
  I think he's questioning whether those factors changed, not whether those factors contribute to deaths. The claim of the article after all, is that life expectancy has risen.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  In order to judge the merits of the argument it is helpful to understand why certain points are made so journalists will usually provide some citation which justifies their claims. It doesn’t help the argument to provide bad references, let alone to not bother with a reference.
- anthony_d 2y ago
  Yes. The overwhelming majority of gun violence are suicides, so real data is a great proxy for things that are harder to track.
freddealmeida 2y ago

discardedrefuse 2y ago

I can't imagine you'll find a single reason for this. There was an study this week about the decrease in drug and alcohol use amongst young people. Which I'm sure is just one of many contributing factors. https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/12/the-kids-are-maybe-alright-teen-drug-use-hits-new-lows-in-ongoing-decline/ https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/12/the-kids-are-maybe-al... Maybe that was covered in the article, but it's paywalled so I couldn't read passed the free intro paragraphs. And with such a click-baity title, I wouldn't want to anyways.

jejeyyy77 2y ago

cause trump

bsder 2y ago

It's almost certainly ozempic/semaglutide combined with mortality die offs from Covid/drug addiction/etc. Statins had a similarly large effect when they came online.

hattmall 2y ago

It seems that very little of that has anything to do with health. It also seems like the declines are all from the recent COVID induced surges. Have we declined in any of those metrics from 2019 levels? The only one really healthy related is obesity, likely from the combination of GLP-1 and COVID killing obese people. Every decade there is a weight loss miracle cure and everytime we see an outbreak of the side effects a few years later. So it's hard pressed to call a medication induced decline in obesity "healthy". Anecdotally the few people I know that have experienced significant weight loss from Ozempic look anything but healthy.

tzs 2y ago

> In September, the U.S. government announced that the adult-obesity rate had declined in its most recent count, which ended in August 2023. The word "announced" is a link to this [1]. I'm failing to see in that where the rate has declined. According to the "key findings" section of that document, > From 2013–2014 through August 2021–August 2023, the age-adjusted prevalence of obesity did not change significantly, while severe obesity prevalence increased from 7.7% to 9.7%. Later it adds, > Changes in the prevalence of obesity and severe obesity between the two most recent survey cycles, 2017–March 2020 and August 2021–August 2023, were not significant. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db508.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db508.htm

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

insane_dreamer 2y ago

Terrible clickbait title that doesn’t reflect the actual findings.

magic_smoke_ee 2y ago

Important nit: It's best to refer to the GLP-1 medication semaglutide for obesity as Wegovy. Ozempic isn't for obesity but it may cause some weight loss as a side-effect because it's for diabetes and it's a lower dose. Wegovy is the dosage and product for obesity. Medicare covers Ozempic but not Wegovy.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

Is there a rule coined yet about headlines that have 'No one knows why' in the title. Like the Betteridge's law: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." In some cases its true, others its used kinda weakly like we don't know for sure, but there are plausible theories, and in other cases its full wrong, like we do know, its just that the journalist just asked their uber driver on the way home from the bar and they didn't know so research complete go with the headline.