The overall problem yet is just that people are afraid to play the accountability card and start taking responsibility for the problems we have gotten ourselves into.

We have become so good at making pills to solve our problems that we rely too much on the pharmaceutical industry to help us fix what we screwed up.

I watched a movie yesterday called Children of Men and even though the theme of the movie was population control by not having any more babies the over all message was that the world in 2023 had gone into despair. They make reference to the year 2003 and 2007 in the movie it was really weird to see a movie set that close into the distant future make reference to years that we have already gone into.

I did a project last year that while I didn’t receive a good grade on it I did learn alot from it and on the heels of this article you wrote I am going to share with my readers the findings of what I learned in my research last semester.

Here’s the breakdown on the factors:
40% – lifestyle choices with the big three being obesity, smoking and leading a sedentary life.
30% – genetics. This is where I would look for your concerns about ethnicity (my preferred term over race) and health. There are factors that are passed from generation to generation, such as cholesterol, susceptibility to cancer, heart disease, etc. A quick Google search on sickle cell anemia and it’s relation to malaria is an eye-opening read.
10% – access to health care. I think this is where a lot of people want to point a finger when race is brought into the equation, i.e., minorities have less access to health care. While this is unfortunately true in some instances, it appears not to be a significant contributor. That being said, access to health definitely needs to be improved across the board.

I don’t have my notes with me so I can recall the other remaining factors.

hak