Assorted Health Trivia and Infographs

[madd0ct0r]

Disclaimer: The company I now work for is exploring novel ways to try and stymie the US obesity epidemic.
I'm currently being paid to research and produce inforgraphs ect to set the problem in perspective.

So some of this stuff will be stuff I've done for them. Some of it won't.

this one has nothing to do with me. Credit goes here:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669761/inf ... -eats-junk

eating habits world wide: breakfast starts off good



but as the day wears on, people start choosing the unhealthy options:

[Ryan Thunder]

Does the size of the dots indicate anything? Because the unhealthy dots seem very small.

Also, Europe seems to do pretty well.

[Broomstick]

The "bad" dots in the US area might be small, but they're also over the major concentrations of population.

[Ryan Thunder]

The "bad" dots in the US area might be small, but they're also over the major concentrations of population.

I'm not contesting the implications. I'm curious as to why he'd use many small blobs for unhealthy eating and a few large ones for healthy eating.

EDIT: Assuming the blob size means anything at all.

[Broomstick]

Well, maybe the unhealthy eating is concentrated in a geographically small pockets with a lot of people in them?

Part of doing projects like this is to find things out and perhaps lead to more questions about the problem.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

It seems pretty obvious that the size of the dots is based at least indirectly on concentrations of population (I'm going to guess it's number of respondents per locale). The largest dots in the US are along the Boston-Washington Corridor and coastal California while the largest dot in Japan is centered on Tokyo.

If all the small dots were red, that would indicate that unhealthy eating is more an issue outside the major cities, not inside.

[madd0ct0r]

EDIT: That's an intresting point Grandmaster - I've asked them. (better graph is here - http://data.massivehealth.com/)

---
Mobile Apps (or mHealth) are getting steadily more popular.

This is one of the best I've seen (nope, not my work) https://www.zombiesrungame.com/

Basically - in game you are a scavenger for a survivor stronghold. You recieve a mission - eg 'get to the ammo deppo and get some more shotguns rounds, as many as you can carry. It's 300m up the road'

You put your headphones on, and run 300m (anywhere). If you are slow you can hear the zombies getting closer. Stuff might happen during the run that you might need to react to. As time goes on, the news and radio reports you'll hear over your earphones will help you piece the story together.

Genius, especially for evening running.

[madd0ct0r]

HBO have produced a 4 hr, 4 part documentry on obesity in america.

It is all available free and legal here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL ... ion_439861

(no embedding becuase at that length you'd probably want full screen and sofa. For an obesity documentary. Irony abounds)

second thing today is this my company's latest output:



Link to fucking huge picture.

permalink here: http://www.misfitwearables.com/the_madn ... easurement

EDIT-damn - how can i get that to resize with img tags?

[Broomstick]

I fucking hate vanity sizing, it makes it impossible to buy clothes without extensive sessions of trying things on because there's no damn consistency!

[HMS Conqueror]

This "infographic" raises more questions than it answers. What is the "health rating" we are looking at, and how is it calculated? Who is eating at 11pm? In what way is it a "Visualization of 500,000 foods"? One can only wonder.

[Edi]

EDIT-damn - how can i get that to resize with img tags?

You don't, so it's been linkified.

[madd0ct0r]

cheers - in future i'll just crop and re-upload myself

No picture today, just facts gleaned from here:

This was trying to answer the question: "Who pay's in the US health system?'

18% of school kids are obese. 12% of pre-schoolers are obese.

Between 2000 and 2010, 12.5 million people lost their company health insurance.

Obesity among full-time workers costs $73.1 billion/yr in productivity

In 2009 15% of adults (insured or not) avoided medical care due to cost

In 2009 Per capita expenditure on health was $8,000, Canada's was $4,519

Men without a high school diploma die 9.3 years earlier than those with a degree


There is also some good news - some things are improving. but seriously 'Murca, WTF?

[Block]

BMI is a shitty calculator of obesity though, I kinda have to laugh when half my platoon is considered obese and only 3 of those could be considered overweight. I'm apparently obese with 17% body fat because of my weight.

[madd0ct0r]

funny you should say that - we have an infographic coming up of various superheros and sportstar's BMI.

Optimus Prime did not fare well...

BMI fails with taller people, unusaully lean / strong people and robots. It is quite good averaged over the population however. Basically the mass over height ^2 should ^2.3 (or something similar). It was kept simple for general use, and it's simplicity was what made it popular for doctor's to explain how much weight someone needed to loose.

[Esquire]

BMI is a shitty calculator of obesity though, I kinda have to laugh when half my platoon is considered obese and only 3 of those could be considered overweight. I'm apparently obese with 17% body fat because of my weight.

Which BMI is that, though? There's a simple one - straight weight and height comparison, I think - that doesn't take into account things like muscle being much denser than fat, and a much more complex one that does. The first one yields all sorts of craziness, but the second is much more reliable.

[Block]

The simple one is the only one I've seen used.

[madd0ct0r]

there are plenty of increasingly complex models out there that can use your body fat ratio (or correlated measurements, like wrist thickness to arm length)

This is one of the simplest accurate ones: http://bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov/

It's most useful for planning a diet or modifying your food intake to match activty change ( so if you're going on intense training for the next three months, it'll suggest how much to eat then and how much to eat afterwards to keep it.) It's quite good for the long term result.

It's only an energy calc though, it doesn't look at different sources of energy and their effects.

[madd0ct0r]

another week, another infogrpahic:

[Simon_Jester]

It's no surprise that life expectancy pretty much flatlines as a function of healthcare dollars spent; there are very sharp limits on what you can do to keep a human being alive once their body starts failing systematically. And without good genetics, no amount of exercise and modern preventative care can keep your body from starting to go in its late sixties or early seventies.

With genetics of course, much is possible.

[madd0ct0r]

genetics schmetics, americans are just fat, eat too much and exercise too little.
The cost of hiring extra porters to haul fatties about hospitals explains a good chunk of the extra money...

sarcasm aside, the point is that even with the huge expenditures, america's life expectancy sucks compared to other country's with much more modest budgets. This isn't genetics, what with america being the huge melting pot that it is, it's diet and lifestyle and cultural norms.

link to company site: http://www.misfitwearables.com/
if you click on the infographic it takes you to the references

[Simon_Jester]

Maddoc, I'm not saying life expectancy flatlines at American life expectancy. I'm saying you hit diminishing returns, probably somewhere below what Europe spends per capita, let alone the US. Europe spends more mostly for the sake of quality of life, and has overall better lifestyle so yeah, it pays off. The US has poor lifestyles, spends a huge amount of money... but even with good lifestyles, that per capita expense probably wouldn't translate into that big a difference in life expectancy, given current technology and its inability to really repair the effects of aging.

[madd0ct0r]

it'd probably bump you to japan level (maybe 83-84 years)

thing is, for a huge chunk of the US population, the damage is done, the diabetes has happened, the heart has been thickened, the metabolism primed for weight gain. You guys have to work a lot harder to stay in shape - hmm -perhpas i'll see if that can be quantified.

[Broomstick]

Maddoc, I'm not saying life expectancy flatlines at American life expectancy. I'm saying you hit diminishing returns, probably somewhere below what Europe spends per capita, let alone the US. Europe spends more mostly for the sake of quality of life, and has overall better lifestyle so yeah, it pays off. The US has poor lifestyles, spends a huge amount of money... but even with good lifestyles, that per capita expense probably wouldn't translate into that big a difference in life expectancy, given current technology and its inability to really repair the effects of aging.

Don't diss quality of life. There's a HUGE difference between spending your last few years in a nursing home vs. spending it in your own home, even if you're disabled to one degree or another. Sure, by old age most of us, even with the best of care, are going to have issues of one sort or another. But to take my mother as an example - she had a nasty gene (familial hypercholestemia) that, without modern medical care, routinely kills in the mid-40's if you're lucky. Thanks to modern medicine she lived into her late 70's and, despite the damage done, was upright, walking interacting with her family, going out and about in the neighborhood up until her last few months. That's nothing to sneeze at. She's a case where spending money really does make a huge difference.

Part of the problem is the application of funding. The US neglects its population until the neglected issues become a life-threatening emergency, which is the most expensive way to obtain care. It also results in much more morbidity and disability than dealing with the problems early. Again, another example: my spouse - without our Evil State Subsidized Health Insurance we simply could not afford his maintenance medications for his diabetes. Well, not if we wanted to eat and have a place to live, too. He'd be one of those doing without some or all of his meds, which no doubt would result in all sorts of mayhem. Because we can obtain those medications and quarterly doctor visits and the needed testing, though, his condition is stabilized, he's not going blind, losing his limbs, losing his kidneys, etc., etc. Yet that is exactly what happens without access to preventive/maintenance care, and rehab for blindness, amputations, prosthetic limbs, dialysis, and all the other accoutrements of end stage diabetes are far, far more expensive over a year/decade/lifetime than the regimen my spouse is under, yet too many Americans think spending on that is wasteful, or should be a "personal responsibility", and wind up throwing tax money on much, much more expensive emergency interventions. Did I explain that coherently? It's early for me right now.

Anyhow, it's not just how much money you spend, it's HOW you spend it. Do you wait for things to become a crisis that, even in the best of circumstances, leaves the patient maimed, or do you intervene early? How do you convince people to comply with maintenance regimens?

I don't think poor people, or the middle class, set out with the intention of becoming obese, diabetic, or cardiac cripples. I do think lack of access to early help due to our fucked up insurance racket is a significant (though by no means only) factor in this mess. There are cultural and structural issues involved, too, but it's not just a matter of, say, making fresh fruits and vegetables available in a ghetto, there's no magic bullet. Any useful approach will have to be multi-pronged.

The point is that yes, it's best if you avoid the chronic ills entirely. However, due simply to genetics some people are going to wind up with chronic problems, not to mention accidents, knock on effects from various illnesses, etc. However, even then you can still apply medical science to minimize the damage/maximize quality/quantity of life - IF you know what to do and are willing to do it.

[Broomstick]

it'd probably bump you to japan level (maybe 83-84 years)

thing is, for a huge chunk of the US population, the damage is done, the diabetes has happened, the heart has been thickened, the metabolism primed for weight gain. You guys have to work a lot harder to stay in shape - hmm -perhpas i'll see if that can be quantified.

As noted, even when damage is done you can still mitigate it IF you're willing to spend before things go completely to shit instead of locking people out of the system and IF you can get patient compliance.

Where my in-laws live diabetes is disgustingly common (partly diet, but also partly genetics as my in-laws have a lot of Native American ancestors who are more prone to diabetes than Europeans, Asians, and Africans) and is also met with fatalism, an attitude of "why bother? I'm doomed anyway". Insulin is believed to CAUSE blindness and amputation, not prevent it. Why? Partly it's a deep, deep distrust of doctors. Poverty keeps many of these people from seeing a doctor until very late, at which point there is often nothing to be done so doctors are perceived as useless. Thus, most diabetics in that area don't even see a doctor until they are already going blind or have toes rotting off. They get put on insulin and STILL go blind, or lose a limb, so it must be that poison the useless doctor wants you to self-inject, right? Because you didn't have bodyparts dropping off BEFORE you took insulin, right? This is in contrast to a more educated person living in, say, New York City or Chicago who has had regular doctor visits from a young age, where doctors and medicine are perceived to fix people, who might live decades following their doctors' recommendations, taking insulin, and so forth and not have the more dire complications of diabetes.

So it's a two-pronged problem - first, access to medical care at all which in the US is dependent on financial, cultural, and geographic factors; second, patient compliance, which is dependent on financial, cultural, and educational factors. Note that money matters and remember that while the average American is wealthy by global standards US wealth is not evenly distributed and there are places in the US with third world (or worse) conditions, even in urban areas as well as rural/wilderness locations.

[madd0ct0r]

todays article:

http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=612

It's quite long, and explores the rise of convenience food and comfort food at the end of the Victorian age (margarine and cheap sugar). well worth 20min reading time.

final paragraph:

Despite ferociously adverse conditions, mid-Victorian laborers not only survived but thrived. If you remove infant mortality from the equation, life expectancy stood at seventy-five for men and seventy-three for women (the perils of childbirth explain this lower expectancy). Today, the poorest Americans enjoy a life expectancy of seventy-four (sixty-seven if you happen to live in certain parts of Mississippi), and this figure continues to fall. News stories trumpeting a proposed fat tax, the latest anti-obesity campaign, or a ban on super-sized sugary drinks overlook the fact that the very system in which overweight, malnourished poor people live militates against any possibility for improvement. These propaganda campaigns amount to just so many band-aids over gaping wounds—or, indeed, so many heirloom tomato slices over slabs of vat-fried Velveeta. What can “dull wholesome food” mean to you in the absence of affordable health insurance, sound education, a secure job, and a dignified standard of living? If you can’t reach for the brass ring, you might as well reach for the bread-and-marg.