Thereās also nothing free to do aside from the library or the park, if your community is lucky to have them. Once you get to the car, you have to account for gas money.
Iām not the generation youāre complaining about, but also: itās America. We donāt have transit most places. You need the license & car if you donāt want to / canāt afford to depend on rideshares. Motivation/wanting to leave the house is an entirely separate matter.
Who said Iām complaining? It is America and people are free to do what they want until their freedoms trample on others freedoms.
Iām just pointing out generational differences from my own experiences.
Average inflation
When you break it down.
Food inflation is 50-100%
Homeowners insurance went up 20%
Car insurance went up 20-100%
Food is what really hits people in the wallets. When you can see that the cost of some things has doubled you get hit hard. Then you add the increasing costs with shrinkflation and it hits even harder.
5 years ago I could buy a $10 hero with a side and get 2 meals out of it for work. That same hero now has less meat, less mayo and costs $15.99
When a trip to the market for a meal used to cost ~$30 for my family in 2020 and now costs ~$60 for less.
That dozen slices of cheese for $2 is now $4 for 10 slices.
That 1/2 gallon of ice cream for $3 is now 3/8 of a gallon and $4 on sale ($6 normally)
This has lead to a drop in disposable income, this is what will lead to the crash.
I used to buy a new computer every 3 years for my business and a new phone every 2-3 years. My phone is currently 6 years old and my computers are 8 years old. Not because I choose not to buy, I can no longer afford to buy.
That is spending power.
Donāt know about you but my wages havenāt gone up just to balance out the increases. I have gotten a 3% increase every year for the past 5 years.
So, we would have better road congestion in the future? I wonāt complain about that 
If only people would eat 20 - 30% less. Would result in less food demand = prices go down. And healthcare costs would go down drastically as well.
The single variable solution is a myth. The problem is far more complex.
Our bodies are perpetually mal-nourished (most Americans and of course Globally are highly deficient in many micro-nutrients); which affects all parts of biological function including cognition as well as lifestyle - this is essentially affects our entire being as it impacts/informs literally thousands of processes in our bodies - much of what we know and understand and much that we really havenāt figured out.
Our choices in subsidies doesnāt help. Nature, lack of informed decision making, financials, and nurtured lifestyle - are all contributing factors.
Now sure a person who wants to find out more and constantly informs themselves of the foundational workings of their being and then attempts at rectifying the issues - extremely complicated - will have the ability to break through all these barriers - but that is a very tall order.
This is true. Americans sure do overeat, but what they eat is mostly junk that has no real nutritional value other than making people fat. And actual good food costs have skyrocketed even more than the junk has.
Unfortunately, our bodies do not have fuel gauges which can tell is what to eat and when.
The measures they have like hunger, are imprecise.
There is no science which meets the requirements of science when it comes to nutrition. It is almost all subjective and subject to change.
The new obesity shots are likely to lead to a new set of thinking about what is good nutrition as we see a huge number of people who will need to decide what an appropriate diet will be, and observational scientists who will try to reconcile their belief system with these altered human bodies.
Perhaps in 10 years, we will have a group of alternative nutritional propositions to be considered.
Those writers of diet programs need something to keep their income.
Our bodies do have satiety and hunger triggers, which ties into receptors and a myriad cellular signaling pathways. And this is from what we understand.
Insulin resistance and Insulin sensitivity - many are not sensitive to spikes in insulin and thus their resistance hinders much of their signaling. We have GLP-1 agonists that address this particular issue. But it is far from a complete solution without addressing biological function first.
These are not just problems that can be fixed with lifestyle and diet although these help tremendously - these are biological dysfunctions which need to be addressed biologically
Enter nutritional optimization and hormone optimization - this is a whole topic in itself but the answers lie here first - biological care. Dumb analogy, but if a car has leaky lines, it doesnāt matter if you have a full tank of gas. It will eventually just break down.
Now the healthcare industry wonāt even address these and doesnāt even have standards to address them. At its core, the whole issue with our healthcare system is it perpetuates disease by addressing things at their acute juncture without devoting research to preventative aka biological care.
And the quality of our food just sucks unless you can afford better food - but hey at least weāre all living longer lives, again a superficial marker of biological health.
Yes but addressed the larger issue right before this post.
Blaming the health care system is like blaming the car mechanic for design failures which exist in cars.
Most health care providers have no clue as to what constitutes effective scientific evidence for the care they provide.
In the old days they got much of their knowledge of drug treatments from pharmaceutical ādetail menā who were salesmen.
I assume they get their current knowledge from continuing medical education, required by many states, and held at resorts with recreation like golf courses and plenty of time to golf. With a little help from Google between CME sessions.
And yet our neighbor was taken to the hospital just last night because she hadnāt eaten and her blood sugar went down to 34. A simple piece of caramel candy (junk food to some) could have prevented the hospital trip.
A girl we went to high school with passed away early in life do to not eating (anorexic).
We make note of this because there can be other eating issues besides overeating and cost of food. Overeating and the cost of food is nothing in compared to the loss of life and medical costs that are involved in under eating.
Eating is not a part of inflation. Food production, processing and getting food to the market are parts of inflation. Obesity for a diabetic or a person with thyroid issues is something we battle with and not a case of overeating or poor food choices.
Exactly
Agreed I meant as a systemic issue. The healthcare system and health education is a reactive institution; itās not a proactive one. So your analogy fits. My larger point is that all changes start with the self but itās definitely not a mindset and motivation issue - itās a biological one that informs everything else including mindset and motivation which is often a very cheap trope/substitution that gets bandied about.
Nailed it! There is a generational divide where some in older generations view medical issues including diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disorders, addiction, and mental health issues as moral failures or laziness, when as you and @Tried_Tested have noted that there are basic individual differences in biological and neurological chemistry that are foundational to such things.
I have a friend who quit smoking cold turkey and permanently when she found out she was pregnant. I have had many clients work very hard to stop smoking permanently but repeatedly āfailedā (relapsed, or progressed, in cancer terms). They are not less disciplined or less motivated than she is; they simply have more barriers, and more challenging barriers, in their own body, that make their smoking addictions less amenable to many common cessation methods or typical timelines.
Anyway, to get this back to the economyā¦ hereās an interesting graph about food and beverage purchasing power, 2019:Q4 to 2023:Q4.
The prices are definitely higher in that industry today, compared to some others. Just because we can pay a higher price doesnāt mean that we will, or agree with companies that we should:
Considering that a large % of americans are overweight, I would say food prices increasing would be a good time for people to say gee, maybe I should eat less. But if anything, the fatter people get, the MORE they eat. And the more someone eats, the more food costs factor into their overall inflation. It certainly makes a difference when the country as a whole wastes tons of food by eating too much.
There are undereating disorders as well that are a psychological issue that has little/nothing to do with the cost of food.
Yes it is biological and poorly understood. So poorly understood that some attempts to solve the problem only make things worse, both for the individual and society.
IMO it will take a breakthrough to make any significant progress. And what I know about breakthroughs is when they occur cannot be predicted and it takes a special human being to make them. They rarely come from organizations.
The body has its mechanisms and they are set and reset in individual human beings. Remedies appear to work mostly in people inclined to see them work.
I gave up smoking with little effort. I still feel the lure of smoking when I smell the smoke of a good cigar or a pipe full of high quality tobacco.
My eating habits changed after my heart surgery and loss of weight, I take no credit for either the weight loss or the diet change.
Experts felt that lowering the standards for obesity would incline people to lose weight. IMO telling more people that they are obese did not lower the number of obese people, their numbers increased with the change and did not decrease after.
Some day a brilliant mind with the insight of a Linus Pauling, will look at all of the accumulated data and tell us what it really means.
Most people know of Pauling from being runner up in the search for the Double Helix, but he made many breakthrough in other aspects of biological science. When I learned of his explanation of how anesthesia worked without any real experience in anesthesia I was floored, and he became one of my heroes. He read all of the available research and interpreted it as no one else had or could.
Everything is fine except this. We CAN introduce metrics and measures for nutrient optimization - this is not new science - this is old. We have a majority of the tools to do so including blood tests albeit blood tests are not perfect but coupled with symptomology can allow for decent diagnosis - but as you pointed out earlier, we have modalities that arenāt real on basic scrutiny such as our nutritional pyramid. I was just reading somewhere that Magnesium influences over 800 biological process in the body - and that is a single nutrient!
And we have bio-identical hormones - there are associative studies that show for instance that testosterone creates risk of cardiac arrest, but those studies are so poor with almost no controls and yet they get thrown in peoplesā faces upon even a cursory discussion - and yes it can get complicated, but the question then begs what happens to the body when we are deficient in these things over a period of time.
Iāve made strides over the past 2 years because of it and its a night and day difference - but tell me which lobby is going to promote this for a non-patentable $6-9 bottle of what is essentially a supplement? How would it ever be promoted except by bio-hackers and their ilk who promote a range of outlandish things?
In the words of Eric āManaged Realityā is very real, but itās more a managed delusion or collective delusion.
Just thinking out loud so to speak
Uh no. One does not need to be a helicopter pilot, to see a helicopter in a tree and assert accurately āThat should not be thereā.
The whole anti science mixed with social positivity BS and pesudo-science are what are pushing this dangerous narrative, Just because a doctor is not also a PHd in metallurgy because they canāt tell Joe Rogan what the hip replacement carbon content is, therefore they are not competent at making better decisions than praying hip pain away by aligning ones chakras, is eventually going to bring us back to the stone ages.
Society has created this polarizing and paralyzing problem of donāt trust someone more educated than you in professions in their field, and also donāt listen to anyone that holds you responsible for a diet consisting of ice cream and twinkies where your feelings get hurt.
My nutty aunt blatantly says āall doctors are incompetent, and I never trust themā but she has to look over her absurd over compensating implants to make that assertion with any eye contact.
My good friend blames doctors for his bad knee, not the genius idea to wakeboard into floating dock while drunk.
The death of personal responsibility is upon us.
We also do not teach people to cook anymore.
