2 weeks Ago
However, if that family member said something that makes obvious sense — for instance, smoking is bad for your health — it shouldn’t be immediately dismissed along with all their other nonsense. This is how I viewed last week’s press conference in Indianapolis to announce the new state health initiative, “Make Indiana Healthy Again,” hosted by Gov. Mike Braun, U.
S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the new administrator of the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services. No, these three men are not the holy trinity of health care reform — anything but that actually — and yet I still extracted useful takeaways that all of us have been told for decades from health experts.
Have we acted on those recommendations? Obviously not, for the most part. Year after year, our state ranks well below the national average for overall health, from 35th to 45th in some categories. The blame is on us as a people, not on our government.
It’s our daily choices that dictate our collective health, and whatever we’ve been doing for decades simply isn’t working, is it? Kennedy and Oz rattled off a few obvious truths about our country’s health metrics, such as alarming obesity rates, a prediabetes epidemic and staggering chronic illness statistics. Simply because the Trump administration’s top two health officials spew baseless opinions and radical misinformation about other topics doesn’t dismiss the proven facts they shared about Hoosiers and Americans. We’re too fat, too lazy and too sickly with chronicle illnesses.
Period. “The most patriotic thing you can do these days is to get healthy," Oz said. If it takes such flag-waving, jingoistic propaganda to compel or encourage people to get into better shape and improve their health, so be it, I say.
Look at our state’s current condition. “If Indiana was a person, it would likely be obese and diabetic with heart disease, high stress, a chronic illness of some kind and possibly a smoker’s cough," as I wrote last week. So what should we do about it? For starters, take a walk on a regular basis.
“Just 20 minutes a day, break a little sweat,” Oz said at that press conference. Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSS Feed | SoundStack | All Of Our Podcasts Is he wrong because you don’t agree with his politics or rhetoric or medical background? No. It’s a fact that walking can improve cardiovascular health, manage weight, boost mood, reduce stress and even help with sleep.
In my earlier column, I told readers I would share the three things that Hoosiers can begin doing to improve our state’s health, according to Oz. Walking was No. 1.
And it's incredibly easy to do for most people. His second recommendation is to eat healthier, something we've been told since childhood. “Eat food the way it looks when it came out of the ground," Oz said.
His third insight: The No. 1 driver of patients with high medical bills is that they do not other people in their life to help care for them and advocate for them. “That’s right, loneliness,” Oz said.
I’ve been saying this my entire career. Loneliness is a silent epidemic and it’s killing millions of Americans despite the fact it’s never listed on a death certificate. As for Kennedy’s input at that press conference, he noted how Americans are too dependent on addictive processed foods, causing chronic illnesses and premature deaths.
Again, this is nothing new to hear from our mainstream health experts. “Processed food doesn’t give you nutrition..
. and yet you constantly want more. This is poisoning the American people," he said.
This too is true, despite the other ridiculous misinformation Kennedy spreads like manure on a field that’s harvesting ignorance. For example, one day after that press conference in Indianapolis, Kennedy spoke about the latest numbers of autism diagnoses in our country. And he did so with shocking cruelty, callousness and stupidity, wrongly using a blanket characterization for all kids on the autism spectrum.
Nonetheless, his observation about our nation’s addiction to unhealthy processed foods remains valid. And this was my only takeaway from his visit to Indiana, in addition to his sharing this well-traveled quote throughout history: “A healthy person has a thousand dreams, a sick person has only one.” This is a true adage, whether it’s said by Confucius, Tony Robbins or Kennedy.
Just as people selectively choose which facts to heed from the endless buffet of health recommendations, I cherry-pick suggestions that I can apply to improve my quality of life and to extend my life. I don’t care if it’s from Dr. Oz, Dr.
Welby or Dr. Who, who once said, “The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts; they alter the facts to fit their views.” The facts are obvious when it comes to our collective well-being.
Either we act on them or we continue our fatalistic habits and unhealthy tendencies..
