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.
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.
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.
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'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?
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…
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.
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.”
remember during the lockdowns when incidence of cancer diagnoses, heart disease, and other life threatening ailments fell through the floor? I guess those chickens are coming home to roost. The total isolation resulting in depression/drug use, addiction, and overdose may have had a weee bit of an affect too.
I wonder how the median life expectancy has been changing in the past few years. Using the mean certainly allows for some shock and awe, and certainly serves to scare people (considering how much it is skewed by things like infant mortality, drug epidemics, wars, and most anything else that involves people dying at drastically different ages than the otherwise usual range), but it's always seemed to me that the median would be a more useful number. Indeed, the median has generally been a good few years above the mean, at least in America, though I can't say I've found tracking the data down nearly as easy as with the mean (okay, I tried for like, 7 seconds...but it wasn't in the top few results). Never mind the mode, which is even higher than either.
It'd be nice to see data compiled showing the relation of mean, median, and mode, plotted over time, for life expectancy data. At the very least it'd likely help curb inflation, as people recognize that they're going to need a lot more retirement savings if they're suddenly saving for an extra decade than they were expecting using statistics improperly...
This data next year will be very telling to see the true efficacy of strict lockdowns (I suspect very effective at preventing death since vaccines arrived so quickly). Australia data should be interesting next year (very strict to very lax after vaccines).
This is trivially incorrect - it would require exposure level to be constant, whereas in the US people were much more out and about in 2021 than in 2020.
Literally every meaningful mitigation to an airborne virus has been gutted gradually since 2020. No masks. Laughable isolation periods. No updated vaccines for new variants. No restrictions on large/indoor gatherings. False-negative RAT tests. So, yeah, there’s the explanation.
What we need now is a 2 graphs, one for the vaccinated, and one for the unvaccinated. The problem is self-selection: the elderly and obese were more likely to take the shots because of the fearmongering campaign that went along with it. Elderly and obese are more likely to die in the first place.
So we need to carefully select individuals in both groups to be similar in there regards, or control for it statistically.
We will find out --some day soon-- if this vaccine was contributing to health or contributing to deaths. Given the fact that Pfizer wanted to hide the side-effects list from the public for 75 years I'm afraid it is the latter.
Lots of Sudden Adult Deaths. And now people getting weaken immune response reinfections like Shingles. And even Athletes dropping out due to heart damage from the vaccine. Literally while Novak Djokovic wasn't allowed to play for not taking the vaccine, another athlete had to drop out of the same tournament with chest pains. Many people have low level myocarditis heart damage, that went undetected. Only when stressed it might suddenly show up and drop them in the years to come.
[+] [-] eric4smith|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] remarkEon|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stouset|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] timr|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fortran77|3 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] nu11ptr|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] NovaVeles|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tallanvor|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jldugger|3 years ago|reply
> 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
[+] [-] adgjlsfhk1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mancerayder|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mercy_dude|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aembleton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davedx|3 years ago|reply
I wonder why this is the top voted comment
[+] [-] ImaCake|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmarreck|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominotw|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32566758
[+] [-] rsanek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blueprint|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] butwhywhyoh|3 years ago|reply
What's the fascination with this word? It seems to be used to add completely unneeded emphasis, rather than anything resembling its original definition.
[+] [-] diogenescynic|3 years ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] PopAlongKid|3 years ago|reply
"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...
[+] [-] wsc981|3 years ago|reply
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.
---
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wLu98NygrA
[+] [-] robryk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] credit_guy|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ekianjo|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nishs|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] chasd00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cykros|3 years ago|reply
It'd be nice to see data compiled showing the relation of mean, median, and mode, plotted over time, for life expectancy data. At the very least it'd likely help curb inflation, as people recognize that they're going to need a lot more retirement savings if they're suddenly saving for an extra decade than they were expecting using statistics improperly...
[+] [-] rayiner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] obblekk|3 years ago|reply
This data next year will be very telling to see the true efficacy of strict lockdowns (I suspect very effective at preventing death since vaccines arrived so quickly). Australia data should be interesting next year (very strict to very lax after vaccines).
[+] [-] jp0d|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortran77|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stakkur|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lettergram|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] imwillofficial|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] g42gregory|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] panny|3 years ago|reply
* If the vaccine is safe and effective, life expectancy would improve some over 2020
* If the vaccine is safe and ineffective, life expectancy would stay about the same as 2020
* If the vaccine is unsafe and ineffective, life expectency would drop below 2020
We are now witnessing the third outcome.
[+] [-] majormajor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kredd|3 years ago|reply
- 68% fully vaccinated in USA, dropped life expectancy in 2021
- 86% fully vaccinated in Canada, increased life expectancy in 2021
Obviously there are a lot of other potential variables, but it’s hard to make a judgement purely based on vaccination and implying they are unsafe.
[+] [-] nishs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drekipus|3 years ago|reply
Also your logic is wrong. If vaccine is safe and effective, the life expectancy would remain the same (IE: no additional deaths due to covid)
You're trying to make a point and not making a very good job of it.
[+] [-] hackflip|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cies|3 years ago|reply
So we need to carefully select individuals in both groups to be similar in there regards, or control for it statistically.
We will find out --some day soon-- if this vaccine was contributing to health or contributing to deaths. Given the fact that Pfizer wanted to hide the side-effects list from the public for 75 years I'm afraid it is the latter.
[+] [-] dukeofdoom|3 years ago|reply