Thinking Citizen Blog — “Only 12% of Americans Are Metabolically Healthy” — True Or False? Big Deal Or Not? What To Do?
Thinking Citizen Blog: Thursday is Health, Health Care, and Global Health Policy Day
Today’s Topic: “Only 12% of Americans are Metabolically Healthy” — True or False? Big Deal or not? What to do?
Has a health statistic ever grabbed you by the collar lately and shaken you awake?
The source of the quote is David A. Kessler, MD, who was FDA Commissioner under both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton from 1990 to 1997 and then head of Operation Warp Speed under Joe Biden. He was Dean of Yale Medical School between 1997 and 2003. He is the author of “How Your Food Is Fooling You — How Your Brain is Hijacked by Sugar, Fat, and Salt (2012) and more recently of “Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: the New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight” (2025).
Today, a few notes after reading Dr. Kessler’s article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “RFK, Jr. Can Take On America’s Addiction to Carbs.”
How serious is America’s addiction to carbs? What would you do about it if you were health Czar? Is this problem both urgent and important? Where would it appear on your list of top priorities if you were, say, the President of the United States?
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
74% OF US ARE OVERWEIGHT OR OBESE, 40% OF US ARE INSULIN-RESISTANT OR PREDIABETIC
1. Obesity rates have tripled since the US first released its dietary guidelines in 1981.
2. “The guidelines are wrong to recommend that 45% to 65% of daily calories come from carbs.”
3. “That percentage is too high for the metabolically challenged bodies that have become the norm, especially since most people consume carbs in the ultraprocessed forms.”
“SKEPTICS MAY RESPOND THAT THE ONLY WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT IS THROUGH BURNING MORE CALORIES THAN YOU CONSUMER, REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOU EAT”
1. “While that is true, not all calories are made equal.”
2. “Cutting calories from carbohydrates will lower insulin levels, which in turn helps mobilize fat from fat cells and burn that fat as fuel.”
3. “Low-carbohydrate diets also keep people feeling full longer and preventing fluctuating feelings of hunger.”
NB: “So it can be easier to lose weight by cutting carbs.”
“THE DIETARY GUIDELINES FOR AMERICANS ARE REVIEWED EVERY FIVE YEARS TO ADVISE ON WHAT TO EAT TO PREVENT CHRONIC DISEASE.” — what changes would you make?
1. “The recommendations were designed primarily for healthy bodies, which most Americans don’t have. “
2. “The guidelines don’t account for the dysfunctional state of our bodies.”
3. “In people with insulin resistance and obesity, visceral fat accumulates in the abdomen and infiltrates the liver, pancreas, and heat, leading to a dysregulated metabolic state and type 2 diabetes.”
NB: “Then a vicious circle of fatty-acid rlease, insulin resistance, and organ damage ensues. Eating high-carbohydrate foods fuels this fire.”
POSTCRIPT
1. What would your recommendations be for physical activity?
2. How would you break it down by aerobic, strength, and flexibility training?
3. How about starting with a K-12 requirement of an hour a day of intense physical training?
Opinion | RFK Jr. Can Take On America’s Addiction to Carbs
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
YOUR TURN
Please share the most interesting thing you learned in the last week related to health, health care or health care policy — the ethics, economics, politics, history….
Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to health are or health care policy that the rest of us may have missed.
Or just some random health-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make someone’s day. Or to cement in your mind something really important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than you otherwise would about something that matters.
