Every Year There Are 250,000 Preventable Deaths

'Cause this is the first time we're experiencing in 100 years in our nation's history since World War I, where in this country we are now experiencing three consecutive years of life expectancy declines. And that's because of the opioid epidemic, the obesity crisis, as well as what's considered the plateauing and the decline of deaths from cardiovascular disease, as well as cancer. The CDC estimates that every year there are 250,000 potentially preventable deaths in the United States. So that's just taking the five leading causes of death, heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, and unintentional injury. If the states that had the highest mortality rates did as well as the states in this country that had the lowest mortality rates, we would save 250,000 Americans every single year. And so I think the timing of this conversation is really important. It's true.

And you know, it's interesting if you take a map If you go in the CDC and see these maps of obesity, diabetes, and life expectancy, they completely superimpose in terms of the states with the highest rates of these problems.

That's right.

And the worst are the southeast.

Yeah, yeah.

Southern cooking, I guess, where there's more obesity, there's more disease. And you know, when I graduated medical school, probably you did too, there was not a single state that had an obesity rate over 20%. And now there's not a single state that has an obesity rate under 20% and many have 40 and many more are encroaching on 40. So when you think about 40% obesity rates, 75% overweight, I mean the entire country is a fat country.

Absolutely. And unfortunately, many of the states that you cited, you know, have that ratio of pretty low spending on social services, the healthcare spending. And they also have high uninsured rates as well. So they're finding themselves spending a lot of money on the healthcare side of the equation. for things that are preventable.