Reverse Darwinism

Is the human race devolving? Americans grew fatter and sicker over the last decade and pop pills like candy. 

A decade ago, federal health officials set health goals for Americans to meet over the next ten years, and rather than meet the standards, the country has fallen woefully short. One example: obesity levels, rather than dropping to 15 percent as hoped, actually more than doubled to 34 percent. And that’s not all.

Americans are eating more fat and salt, more suffer from high blood pressure, and more children have untreated tooth decay, says research from the Healthy People 2010 project.

On a more optimistic note, there have been fewer workplace injuries, vaccination rates have improved, and there have been fewer deaths from cancer, stroke and heart disease.  

As officials set up national health goals for 2020, what can Americans do to encourage better health?   

First of all, Americans must stop fooling themselves, says leading health and wellness authority Dr. Eric Plasker, best-selling author of The 100 Year Lifestyle and The 100 Year Lifestyle Workout. 

“The problem is not genetics,” Plasker says. “We blame a lot of things on genes, whether it is heart disease or cancer. Health and quality of life is due to only about 30 percent genetics, and 70 percent lifestyle.”

The notion that genetics solely or largely responsible for one’s health is dangerous, he maintains, as is the “quick-fix drug culture” permeating our society. “When people blame their health status on genetics, it takes away the level of responsibility for making choices that is not healthy,” Plasker notes.

What we need to do, the doctor urges, is to examine the American lifestyle. “For many Americans, whether because it is fast-paced or we search for convenience, or whether we just have developed very bad lifestyle habit patterns, we are eating in destructive patterns, thinking destructively, affecting our quality of life as we age, eating more processed foods and less live foods, sitting more and moving less, have longer commutes, and have jobs that are more sedentary,” he explains. “The activity level for the average American is almost insignificant.”

Unwillingness to eat more healthfully and move more, Plasker maintains, has led to a dependence on pharmaceuticals, which pose additional health risks. While Americans are poised to live longer, none of the drugs they currently take to treat, for example high cholesterol, have been tested for long-term side effects.   

“One-hundred year old people are one of the world’s fastest growing segment of the population,” he explains. “The number of 100 year old people will grow by 700 percent by 2040. If you want quality of life as you age there is not drug that has been treated for twenty, thirty, or forty years.”  

The drug ads, he explains, list the side effects, but it seems Americans aren’t listening. “When you hear on the drug TV commercials, it is important to close your eyes and just listen to the side effects,” Plasker advises. “The physiological changes are happening whether you feel the symptoms or side effects or not.”

These side effects will affect long-term health, he warns. “If you start taking a cholesterol drug at age forty because you are unwilling to change your lifestyle, the odds of having drug-related challenges at fifty and sixty years old will increase,” Plasker explains. “If you make lifestyle changes, you can lower cholesterol, have lower blood pressure, better digestion, and lower blood sugar, [among other health benefits].”

When one relies on drugs rather than diet to improve one’s health, other health hazards may occur. “If you are eating in a way that is bad for you, and bad for heart, you are headed for a crisis anyway,” Plasker explains. “You may just change it or prolong the crisis.”

It is indeed challenging to convince Americans to change their unhealthy lifestyles, agrees Christopher T. Fey, founder and CEO of U.S. Preventive Medicine, a leading a global preventive health care movement. 

“The Healthy People objectives provide a blueprint for the direction Americans need to take if we want to improve our health and well being,” Fey says. “The challenge, however, is motivating people to change their behavior. Whether it’s soft drinks, junk food or the cozy couch, bad habits are hard to break. It’s no wonder diabetes and obesity have reached epidemic proportions.”

Especially frustrating is that many of the top killers of Americans are preventable. "In the United States, 80 percent of health care dollars and 70 percent of deaths stem from the same chronic conditions,” Fey explains.

“Five diseases cause the majority of all U.S. deaths annually—heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (bronchitis, emphysema) and diabetes," he adds. "Although chronic diseases are among the most common and costly of health problems, they are also the most preventable.  People can choose to live longer, happier lives by understanding their risks and making lifestyle changes to reduce those risks. Yet, Americans continue to make unhealthy choices."  

Julie Douglis, director of the TX-based Douglis Clinic, says that one particular obstacle is getting patients to honestly examine their eating habits. “The hardest thing most of my dieters face is getting off sodas and other sugar filled foods. Many of my patients drink one to two six-packs of Dr. Pepper in one day,” she says. “This leads to 100-pound and up weight gains in three to six years, easily. Yet they tell me that they don’t eat much—they never seem to count the calories in drinks.”

Like Plasker and Fey, Douglis discounts the argument that poor health and obesity is largely due to genes. When dealing with childhood obesity, often the parents argue that the issue runs in the family.

“They often say the child’s size is genetic, yet photos of grandparents and great-grandparents do not show this to be true,” Douglis maintains. “I often tell patients to look at photos of themselves at the same age and photos of their parents compared to the child’s. I often see mothers of children aged six months and younger giving the baby Coke in a straw, or french fries—high-fructose corn syrup and fat.”

It is no surprise then, that the Healthy People data showed an increase in untreated tooth decay in children. “Tooth decay starts early,” Douglis explains. “We also see a lot of tooth decay due to prolonged use of antibiotics. I have seen five-year olds with capped teeth due to antibiotics.”

Children have also suffered from a lack of physical activity in school over the last decade. “I have seen the schools under pressure from testing to not only exclude physical education from their daily curriculum, but even eliminate one or both recesses and then cut back on the time [children] get to play right after lunch,” Robert Rose, PhD, says. “They don't realize how much these play times actually help the development of their brains.”

Douglis agrees that the lack of physical education in the public schools, as well as sedentary activities outside of school, she adds, noting that when teenage boys socialize, they don’t play catch anymore, they play video games.

“The concern is that the younger generation will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents; that is not due to genetics, it is due to lifestyle,” Plasker warns.

While experts agree that getting Americans to improve their lifestyles is an obstacle, some research reveals a brighter future, says James Chung of marketing strategy and research firm Reach Advisors.

“Our demographic analysis and consumer survey data leaves us seeing a very different picture,” says Chung, who calls the Healthy People data “troubling."

“We're now spending a lot of time with our clients planning for a dramatic shift so prominent that we're calling the 2010s as the Decade of Total Wellness,” he contends. “We're actually seeing an acceleration of healthy behaviors, with a long-term sustained trend in the works."

The trend, Chung adds, is “in part driven by consumer patterns shifting with the economy, and more so driven by demographic patterns such as a healthier aging population.”

Educational attainment, he notes, plays a role, so projections for an overall health-oriented trend must be considered carefully. “The shifts that we're seeing correlate rather strongly with educational attainment,” Chung says. “In other words, well-educated consumers are getting healthier. The average consumer isn't.”   
 
Fey says that the average American will soon have no choice other than to strive for a healthier life, and that there needs to be a push to encourage health-focused behaviors. "In order to achieve real results, we need to move beyond health screening and education to the bigger challenge of influencing behavior change,” he asserts. 

“That is the goal of the preventive health care movement,” Fey explains.”While the health care industry prepares for unprecedented legislative change, a paradigm shift is quietly taking place—the transformation from a reactive, treatment-centric health care system to a proactive approach focused on prevention. The American ingenuity that brought us airplanes and artificial hearts is steadily uncovering ways to help people live longer, healthier lives.”

In the face of such conflicting data, will the coming decade bring even worse health or will the overall health of Americans improve?

"The United States is experiencing a paradigm shift toward prevention because we have no choice,” Fey maintains. “The United States can no longer afford a system where 70 percent of deaths and nearly 80 percent of health care costs stem from the same preventable chronic conditions.”

Preventive health care is key to healthier people, he contends, and we must view health care from a new perspective to succeed. “The global preventive health care movement represents an entirely new way of thinking, centered on preserving health rather than merely treating disease,” Fey says. “If we can reconnect patients with health care providers for advice and encouragement at every stage of the prevention continuum—not just when they are sick—we have a real opportunity to reverse the trend of declining health in our nation."

Plasker is “very optimistic” about health in the coming decade. “Our political tide is turning, we are the first generation that is getting the advance notice that we are going to live longer then we thought, and we are committed to lifestyle changes,” he states. “More and more people will be able to truly enjoy a sensational century.