You need to take better care of your heart. No, we’re not judging—it’s just a statistical reality. A new study published Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that rates of cardiovascular disease in the U.S. over the next four decades are on track to spike like your blood pressure after a triple cheeseburger.
The new projections are based on data from the 2020 U.S. Census Bureau combined with heart disease and risk factors data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Among the general population in the U.S., cardiovascular risk factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity are expected to increase dramatically between 2025 and 2060.
Roughly 55 million more Americans are projected to suffer from diabetes and 126 million more Americans are expected to be obsese by 2060. The researchers also predict that rates of stroke and heart failure will rise by more than 33 percent each—impacting a combined 28 million Americans.
What’s worse is that this rise is expected to disproportionately impact all minority groups—with Black and Hispanic populations bearing the biggest brunt of these increases in cardiovascular risks while rates decrease overall for white people. For example, the study found the number of Black adults suffering from diabetes will jump from 13 percent currently to 20 percent by 2060; and nearly 60 percent will have hypertension, a jump from 55 percent now.
This is especially damning considering the fact that advances in medicine should prevent such increases. But according to the study’s authors, the issue is systemic: Minority groups are frequently overlooked and neglected when it comes to health policy. Factors such as food deserts, lack of medical access, and income inequality in Black and Brown communities all contribute to a widening disparity in public health. This is further backed by past research that found that chronic lack of access to healthy food results in higher rates of diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular illness. The researchers say that the findings outline clear disparities in the U.S. healthcare system and are a call to action to fix them.
“Our analysis projects that the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors and diseases will continue to rise with worrisome trends,” James L. Januzzi Jr. a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of the study, said in a press release. “These striking projections will disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minority populations in the U.S. Understanding these results will hopefully inform future public health policy efforts and allow us to implement prevention and treatment measures in an equitable manner.”
Do you ever read between the lines on this stuff?
"What's worse" is that it's black and brown people that are getting sick, and not white people. WTF?!
So who is suppose to teach black and brown people that eating fast food 3 times a day causes obesity? Is that the "equitable" duty of white people? Should white people take black and brown people by the hand and show them how to eat, and punish them when they don't eat as they've been told? I feel like punishing a black or brown person for eating fried chicken or chimichangas would be racist. Don't you?
If white people have to teach black and brown people how to manage their behavior, how is that not white supremacy in action? Seriously. Who is suppose to teach black and brown people how to eat and exercise?
It's as if the doctors are implying that black and brown people are children and need to be coddled by the same system of people that oppresses them. Like part of being black and brown is not having any agency.
If I was black or brown I would be so offended by the stuff that these white supremacists assert. I would say, "Hey! Hold up there, buddy. Maybe I want to eat fried chicken and sit on the couch and watch sportsball. That doesn't mean I'm too stupid to know that one day it might make me unhealthy. I don't need white folks telling me how to eat. Keep your racism to yourself."
The entire concept of "racism" as a social pariah is dumb for several reasons. When black and brown people act like black and brown people, then the system of white superiority is to blame. That's rather obvious, on merit. It's one thing to expect white people to act like white people, but when society expects black and brown people to act like white people, there's going to be an obvious problem.
When we hear the terms "systemic racism" and "racial equity," what that means is that black and brown people aren't acting like white people, therefore the collective system of white people needs to try harder to make black and brown people more white.
If I were to summarize this "study" in a non-PC manner, it would read: Evidence from recent study shows that black and brown people aren't white.
It took them about 50 years to figure out that equality is bullshit, but at least they figured it out. But if you noticed how they did it, even that is racist. They replaced the slogan of "equality" with "equity" with the idea that black and brown people wouldn't know the difference between the two.
I wonder if "they" were white people.
Sad.
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