Somebody should tell Arnold Kling that tarring liberal thought by associating it to those perfidious Europeans is so 2003. He's embarrassing himself. Meanwhile, a few posts up, Kling's colleague Michael Cannon has some good news out of a new study finding that Americans are actually becoming substantially healthier, even as our waistlines expand. "Despite substantial increases in obesity in the past three decades, the overall population risk profile is healthier now than it was formerly. For the population aged 25-74, the 10 year probability of death fell from 9.8 percent in 1971-75 to 8.4 percent in 1999-2002. Among the population aged 55-74, the 10 year risk of death fell from 25.7 percent to 21.7 percent. The largest contributors to these changes were the reduction in smoking and better control of blood pressure. Increased obesity increased risk, but not by as large a quantitative amount."
Incidentally, the blood pressure issue is rather interesting, as I've recently noticed myself in the "prehypertensive" category on all those neato little drug store blood pressure machines. This really stressed me out, at least until I realized that the reason I never fell into the category before is that the category didn't exist until recently. My blood pressure didn't change, its label did. That doesn't actually have much bearing on the fact that I should probably try to push it down to levels where "hypertensive" doesn't appear in the name at all, but still, to paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave normal blood pressure levels, normal blood pressure levels left me.
