Meeting our health goals: A 10-year review
Every 10 years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sets a number of health-and-fitness goals for the American public, and every 10 years the department looks back and evaluates how we’ve done as a nation in meeting the previous set of 10-year goals.
Since this is a government agency, there are a lot of goals. A huge amount, in fact. Let’s put it this way: each decade’s list of goals is issued as, and fills, an entire book.
Since the latest 10-year span just ended on the 31st, the data has not yet been finalized, but we’re so close that it’s safe to take some numbers as bankable. Among those:
- 117 goals can be said to have been met, but that is out of 635 targets, for a skimpy 18.5 percent success rate. Even more discouraging, in about 23 percent of the goals, we’re actually worse off than 10 years ago.
- One of those fallbacks has been in weight control, where the goal was to reduce our obesity rate from 25 percent to 15 percent. In fact, that rate has ballooned to 34 percent. Similarly, instead of reducing our rate of high blood pressure from 28 percent to 16 percent, we increased it by a point or two. We also put up worse numbers in the areas of childhood tooth decay and undersized newborns, among others.
- But overall, the experts are encouraged. Along with the 117 met goals, significant progress was made in the case of 332 others, with at least some improvement shown in 70 percent of the goals. Cancer death rates are down, for example, and childhood vaccination rates up.
Maybe this will be the decade in which we actually do lose weight and get in shape. Check back with us in 2020.
“I didn’t fail the sobriety test, Your Honor, I failed the adiposity test.”
To our growing list of crimes and court cases in which a defendant has claimed to be too obese (a) to have committed the crime, or (b) to fit through the courtroom door, or (c) to be confined to a cell, or (d) to execute by any humane means, we can now add (e) to be required to take a field sobriety test.
This comes to light via the case of a clinically obese (five-foot-ten, 230 pounds) driver of a 1997 Honda who refused to take a Breathalyzer test and then failed several routine roadside sobriety tests and was busted for DWI in Portsmouth, Maine. The defendant took the case to court and was initially found guilty, but an appeal by his attorney argued that a number of standard sobriety exercises, such as stepping toe-to-toe and turning, were unduly difficult for obese people in general, sober or otherwise, and should not be applied to them, and that indeed traffic cops were trained to not do so. A judge agreed, and lifted the conviction.
But before you slap your forehead and cry, “What?!”, the judge did find him guilty of reckless driving, which cost him $500 and a license suspension. Our verdict? Anybody who is physically able to fit behind the wheel of a Honda should be able to walk toe-to-toe and swivel without falling over.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News (REF3076322B7)
A ten-year assessment of our national health, and being too fat for roadside sobriety tests