You can't discern the cankers and the warts at 30,000 feet, but taking in the big picture often helps us understand the motivations that play out as the tangled inconsistencies of daily news stories about health. There are some whose mission in life is to point in alarm at instances where individuals or society comes up short -- where problems mar perfection. These professional and persistent pessimists, in the health arena, would have us focus attention and resources on such interventions as dietary changes ostensibly to effect improved health outcomes, but based only on plausible, but unproven scientific evidence.
A blog today on JunkFoodScience hits the nail on the head:
There's been so much good news recently about the state of our health and that of children. This has clearly distressed alarmists. To keep their gloomy myths alive, they've tried to: A). bury the news and B). convince us that good is really bad.
With people not buying any of that, they've added plan C: scream louder. As Dr Ian Campbell, medical director of Weight Concern, told the BBC news this week: "We are not making enough progress!"
Facts have such a troublesome habit of getting in the way of agendas. Let's look at three major new health reports that all brought good news.
Author Sandy Szwarc points out that the 2006 National Health Interview Survey released recently found 88% of Americans self-report good or excellent health, new figures released this past week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing strong historic trends of lengthening life expectancies and falling rates of heart disease, and a UNCEF announcement this week that more children are surviving today than ever before in history.
We think the glass is at least half full, and filling steadily.
