Posted on 01/30/2025 10:57:58 AM PST by marktwain
At one of the confirmation hearings in the Senate, for President Trump's nominee Robert F. Kennedy to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy asked an interesting question, slightly paraphrased below:
How is it that the wealthiest nation on the earth, the United States of America, is not the healthiest nation on earth? How is it we have increasing levels of Obesity, Depression, Diabeties, etc?
The question assumes the wealthier a nation is, the healthier it should be. This is not necessarily true.
Many of the problems noted by RFK Jr. are diseases caused by abundance. Wealth is the cause of the disease, not its cure.
The human body is designed to be physically active. Humans have, for thousands of years, had to work hard to have enough to eat. Foods which humans love have been hard to find in nature, which is why they have been so desirable.
Fat is difficult to find naturally, at least in abundance.
Sugar is difficult to find naturally, in abundance.
Salt is generally not abundant in nature.
The industrial revolution, followed by the rise of the petrolium society, and now the digital economy, have rendered food in the United States of America abundant, cheap, and easily attained.
The same petrolium society with the digital economy has made exercise unnecessary for the vast majority of people.
The incredible success of sanitation, vaccines, and medical procedures have resulted in great numbers of people who would have died before adulthood or in early adulthood more than 65 years ago. Large numbers of people who would have died in accidents have been saved because of higher safety standards. These factors have resulted in a higher population of older and sicker people vulnerable to diseases of abundance.
As mentioned in the movie "Idiocracy", More people are surviving and reproducing who would not have been able to in a society which was not so wealthy.
Thus, much of our medical problems have resulted from our wealth, not in spite of our wealth.
Of course, the rise in wealth has corresponded with a rise in processed food, in more money being used in the "healthcare" industry, in more use of plastics, pesticides, and artificial fertilizer.
It appears more likely all of these things are the result of more wealth.
No other large country has food as cheap, has everything as convenient, and allows so much wealth to its individual citizens, as the United States.
When we were less wealthy, we were healthier in most of the things RFK Jr. mentions.
We also had more communicative diseases, more accidents, more deaths during pregnancy and childbirth, more deficiency diseases, more problems caused by insufficient calories in the diet.
Those maladies have been severely reduced by our unparalleled wealth. In their place, we now have numerous diseases and problems caused by abundance.
Japan is wealthy. Obesity & diabetes are much lower than United States.
It’s interesting, sources of calories used to be so scarce in the days of hunters and gatherers that humans evolved the ability to store calories (energy) as fat, for when the pickings were meager.
Now that survival mechanism has turned lethal in these days of overabundance!
Used to be calories were a treasured commodity, today it’s a dirty word.
We’ve become victims of our own success!
I don’t think its wealth per se but people wealthy influencing public policy which causes broken families and poor living conditions.
Its a moral problem.
I eat all the same crap food as everyone else. Why I don’t have diabetes at age 84? Why I never had a heart attack or stroke? I weigh 153 lbs at 5’8” tall. Even took 3 jabs of experimental vax 4 year ago. Still no blood clots knock on wood.
genetics
</grin>
I have a very general rule of thumb for judging American society, whether it be food, pharmaceuticals, sexual morality, personal finance, politics, - if it’s discussed or advertised on broadcast or cable TV - ITS BAD FOR YOU
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Lol
“I like your general rule.”👍
Slab City is Nice about Now!
That’s why the poor snowbirds flock there.
I would generally agree; however, I would suggest this country has also gone away from God.
People love to blame anyone but themselves for their problems. As part of this, people love to postulate that evil others are deliberately doing things to harm them, rather than to acknowledge the world is a complicated and dangerous place.
Claiming evil others are deliberately harming us is much easier than determining a phenomena based in our own mental state and the existence of random events in the Universe.
"Don't blame you! Don't blame me! Blame that guy behind the tree!
The ‘disease of abundance’ is nonsensical. That’s why it’s the pet peeve of leftists because it’s yet another pretext to propangandize against prosperity and capitalism.
If wealth causes obesity, so why the poorest are the most obese?
Answer... cricket.
Edwin Shoemaker died on March 15, 2015, at the age of 90. while Edward Knabusch died on February 24, 1988, at the age of 88. So, they both lived good long lives. Both men did die in their La Z-Boy chairs, but neither were lazy men at all.
Exactly so. When the USA was poorer, we couldn't afford to pay poor people not to work, but to stay at home, eat more than was good for them, and produce lots of babies to do the same in the next generation.
Processed food is generally more expensive than food which is not processed. If you purchase beans and rice in 25 lb bags, you can live off of that relatively cheaply.
Giving people enough money to buy expensive processed food when they are "poor" creates a lot of problems.
In most the world, the "poor" people in the USA would be middle class or upper middle class.
‘Japan is wealthy. Obesity & diabetes are much lower than United States’
Except our wealthiest are our thinnest and healthiest.
Answer... cricket.
Your assumptions are mistaken. Around the world, poor people are very thin, because they cannot access enough calories. Before a 100 years ago, obesity was a sign of wealth.
It is only in a very wealthy society that poor people get fat.
100 years ago, wealthy people did not understand the value of exercise, the problems of being overweight, and the dangers of obesity.
Poor people get fat because society is wealthy. American poor people would be considered upper middle class or middle class in most of the world.
In most poor societies around the world, if a person is fat, they are considered wealthy.
But I do not believe wealth tells the whole story as to why we are not healthy. I think nefarious actors do play a part as to why we are not healthy, and it is by design. Something is without question for the occurrences of autism to keep rising in larger percentages. We can see the rise, so there must be a cause. Population growth would increase numbers, but not percentages. Vaccines are a great place to examine, because the number of vaccines that we administer to children has grown to ridiculous numbers. Probably would kill adults with the numbers newborns are now subjected to,
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