Topic: How Americans are living dangerously

[Pugnate]

linky

How Americans are living dangerously
POSTED: 3:54 a.m. EST, November 26, 2006
By Jeffrey Kluger
Time
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Editor's note: The following is a summary of this week's Time magazine cover story.

(Time.comexternal link) -- It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren't so many things trying to kill you every day.

The problems start even before you're fully awake. There's the fall out of bed that kills 600 Americans each year. There's the early-morning heart attack, which is 40 percent more common than those that strike later in the day.

There's the fatal plunge down the stairs, the bite of sausage that gets lodged in your throat, the tumble on the slippery sidewalk as you leave the house, the high-speed automotive pinball game that is your daily commute.

Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we'd get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong.

We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the United States, but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year.

We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn't) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.

Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap.

"We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million," says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. "Now it's parts per billion."

At the same time, 20 percent of all adults still smoke; nearly 20 percent of drivers and more than 30 percent of backseat passengers don't use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese.

We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas -- and when they're demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot.

Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it's something we'll never do exceptionally well, it's almost certainly something we can learn to do better.
Dread skews response

Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread.

For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That's not the way humans see things.

The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. The more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening.

The same is true for, say, AIDS, which takes you slowly, compared with a heart attack, which can kill you in seconds, despite the fact that heart disease claims nearly 50 times as many Americans than AIDS each year.

We also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot of people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a chronic, distributed way.

Unfamiliar threats are similarly scarier than familiar ones. The next E. coli outbreak is unlikely to shake you up as much as the previous one, and any that follow will trouble you even less.

In some respects, this is a good thing, particularly if the initial reaction was excessive. But it's also unavoidable given our tendency to habituate to any unpleasant stimulus, from pain and sorrow to a persistent car alarm.

The problem with habituation is that it can also lead us to go to the other extreme, worrying not too much but too little. September 11 and Hurricane Katrina brought calls to build impregnable walls against such tragedies ever occurring again.

But despite the vows, both New Orleans and the nation's security apparatus remain dangerously leaky.

"People call these crises wake-up calls," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness.

"But they're more like snooze alarms. We get agitated for a while, and then we don't follow through."

Click here for the entire cover story on Time.

I know a few of you won't appreciate the poke at eating fat rich food, but I am sure you will appreciate some of the irony. I thought the article was hilarious, and I don't think it is just Americans, people all over are like this.

Like they will order the craziest burgers and then go for a diet coke.

[Quemaqua]

Yeah, it's the truth, and Pug is right, it really isn't just Americans, this is just modern society in general.  I'm sure it's worse in America and some other places than many locales, but this seems to be a pretty universal problem.

[idolminds]

I find most people that order a diet coke do it because it tastes better to them than regular coke, not because they are trying to watch their weight or something.

But yes, thats a true article. I know fatty foods are bad for me, but damned if I'm going to stop eating them. Unlike most people, I dont let all those other "scary things" frighten me. That e.coli/spinach scare I just laughed at how ridiculous people were about it.

[poomcgoo]

Idol is right about the Diet Coke thing.  I've been saying that to people forever -- there are just some people who go nuts over the taste of Diet Coke for some reason.  I'm sure there are some people still trying to count calories though.  If that's the case it still really isn't that ridiculous.  Say you get a Big Mac and it has like 500 calories.  If you buy a large coke with it, all of a sudden you're at 900 calories.  With a Diet Coke, you're still at 500.  I guess it's all about damage control.

I, on the other hand, fucking love fast food.  McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King, and Wendy's all make this world a better place to live in.  Don't like that it's fatty?  Dont eat it.  Exercise.  Just don't ruin it for me.

[Pugnate]

Never thought of it that way, it is a good point. I guess it is more about damage control to those who eat junk food regularly. For someone like me, who eats crap maybe once every few months, I go all out.

[Xessive]

I used to prefer the taste of diet coke, then they did something to it and now it's kinda bitter compared to regular coke.

I've pretty much quit all soda drinks.. I don't know if I just started to dislike them or my taste buds have caught on, but they all taste really weird to me right now.. Like dilute or something. I can feel a separation between the syrup granules and the liquid.. It's really weird. And since it's virtually impossible to get a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice anywhere here I'm just gonna stick with water until some fresh juice comes my way. I've even tried looking for juicing oranges that I will squeeze myself, but everything they have in the markets here are "dry" oranges, they're just for eating, I could juice 'em but I'll need about 25 oranges to fill a cup. Anyway, I hate the boxed/canned/bottled orange juice.. It all tastes weird and somewhat metallic to me. I'd still take it over the weird taste I'm getting of sodas now.

Pug: Wooh KFC once a year We need pain to remind us we're very much alive

[idolminds]

I rarely drink soda (pop...whatever) anymore because 90% of the time it gives me hiccups.

[Pugnate]

You know ever since I started on Red Bull, soft drinks stopped doing it for me. They feel so weak.

[poomcgoo]

I drink soda like it's my life support, it's probably the one big unhealthy thing that I need to cut back on.  I try to balance by drinking a lot of Fresca though.  I love the new peach and black cherry flavors.  No calories!

[Ghandi]

Just got this Time magazine, I'll comment more on the article after I read it.

As for the diet Coke thing, my whole family drinks diet Coke for the taste. I got into it for this reason, and I actually find it better than regular Coke. I'm not really healthy, but generally I'll order a diet Coke over a regular Coke.

[Raisa]

Interesting article... but so true..

oh dear... i dont' take sodas often. i've had it three times this year so far.  And I didn't go out to buy it for myself.  I like my junk food but not too often.  The state of my health right now.  i have to be really careful with what I eat so.. yeah

oh well...  I'll prolly die in a car accident.