The Insight: Is America Getting Healthier?

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The average life expectancy in the US rose 0.71 percentage points in the last decade to about 79.4 years. The average life expectancy fifty years ago was 72.86 years.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cites heart disease and cancer as the leading causes of death in the US, and while overall cases of those illnesses among US adults has remained roughly the same, some more specific conditions such as angina and cervical cancer saw slight decreases since 2019. Moreover, World Health Organization (WHO) data suggests, “Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990.”

Prescription drug abuse in the US is significantly declining, with the overall rate in Americans over age 12 falling from 7.1% in 2015 to 4.8% in 2024, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Cigarette smoking among US adults has also seen a decline over the past decade, according to the CDC.

Gallup (Center bias) reported, “After peaking at a record high of 39.9% in 2022, the U.S. adult obesity rate has gradually declined to 37.0% in 2025.” However, the outlet also emphasized the surge in GLP-1 injections, which increased over 100% from 2024 to 2025. Eating disorders are also notably on the rise, “representing a percentage increase of over 70% between 2010 and 2025” among US adults, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

How does physical health impact mental health?

Physical and mental health are, as the American Psychological Association (APA) puts it, “inextricably linked.” In fact, the brain processes mental and physical pain so similarly that yes, you can actually die of a broken heart.

The CDC specifically notes that chronic physical conditions, such as cancer and substance abuse disorders, increase individuals’ risk of developing mental health conditions (and vice versa). It even cites physical circumstances such as social isolation and a lack of economic resources as potential risk factors. The severe social isolation of COVID-19, for example, “created a perfect storm for the development and exacerbation of eating disorders.”

Pew Research (Center bias) data found that 39% of US adults in 2025 rated their physical health as excellent/very good and 48% rated their mental health as such. However, upper income Americans rated their physical health 26 percentage points higher, and their mental health 27 percentage points higher than lower income Americans. Pew highlighted that 44% of respondents viewed the price of health care as the most significant challenge in taking care of themselves.

Though mental and physical health have a strong negative correlation, they also have a strong positive correlation, with activities as mild as walking being proven to reduce cortisol levels in the brain.

A study published in the International Journal of Health, Medicine, and Sports, for example, says that physical activity can reduce rates of depression The World Health Organization (WHO) cited depression as the leading cause of disability worldwide in 2017.

Is my wearable technology actually working?

Fitness trackers began their rise in 2012 and have since evolved into wearable devices and multiple apps used for tracking nutrition, daily activity, heart rate and even sleep patterns. Pew Research found that nearly one in five US adults regularly use a smartwatch or fitness tracker.

As adoption has grown, so has the scrutiny over whether the data collected by these devices can be trusted. An article published in the National Library of Medicine found the sensitivity and specificity of smartwatch ECG, including the Apple Watch, in algorithmic readings were roughly 86% and 94%. The Conversation (Lean Left) reported that some wearable devices could measure heart rate with an error rate of plus or minus 3%, however their measurements of calories burned and sleep time and efficiency had an error rate of plus or minus 9% and 10%.

Research also differs on whether wearables are actually helping people reach their fitness goals. A 2021 study from Harvard Medical School pulled data from 31 studies and found that people who wore research-grade fitness trackers (not available to the general public) lost roughly 10 lbs compared to people who didn’t use a fitness tracker. Participants who wore commercially available trackers (like Fitbit or Jawbone) lost an average of 6 lbs.

Conversely, research from Nebraska Medicine in 2025 argued that while fitness trackers can help you recognize patterns and provide feedback on your activity level, health and weight loss ultimately rely on you doing the work. The University of California at Los Angeles came to a similar conclusion in 2022 after it found that smartwatches and wristbands that monitor fitness led to positive health changes in the short term, but that motivation quickly waned after roughly six months.

This idea was also previously supported by a 2016 study from the University of Pittsburgh, which found fitness trackers may offer people a “false sense of security” where they overeat or slack off because their level of physical activity was higher that day, leading to less overall weight loss.

All of these studies suggest that the effectiveness of wearable fitness technology has to do with the user.

A growing body of research and expert opinion also suggests that for many users, constant health monitoring can lead to negative psychological impacts. In 2024, National Geographic shared a study that showed wearing fitness trackers to monitor certain health conditions could make people more anxious and lead to “data overload” in those who struggle to interpret the information. Another clinician cited in the article argued that while the nature of being able to track health is motivating to reach goals, “it can also lead to obsession” and fuel conditions like OCD and eating disorders.

So, is wearable technology working? It seems that most researchers and clinicians land somewhere in the middle. Understanding your daily nutrition intake, food consumption and physical activity levels are helpful for losing weight, but overall health management seems to rely more on the individual using the technology.

How has MAHA had an impact?

Some of MAHA’s safety goals have cross-partisan support, such as bans on artificial dyes and reduced pesticide exposure, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) restrictions on junk food. If you just looked at how similar some of the policies pushed by California’s Democratic leaders and by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have been in the last few years, you’d think they were on the same side of the political aisle.

Meanwhile, sharp divisions remain on things like vaccines and the broader agenda to restructure HHS and cut back public health funding.

Last year, more than 70 bills aimed at food dyes were introduced in 37 states, per the National Conference of State Legislatures. According to CBS News (Lean Left), other efforts “targeting vaccines, fluoridated water, and PFAS, a group of compounds known as ‘forever chemicals’ that have been linked to cancer and other health problems” are also happening at the state level across the country.

CBS continued: Most synthetic dyes used to color food have been around for decades. Some clinical studies have found a link between their use and hyperactivity in children. And in early 2025, in the last days of President Joe Biden's term, the Food and Drug Administration outlawed the use of a dye known as Red No. 3.

Major food companies including Nestle, Hershey, and PepsiCo have gotten on board, pledging to eliminate at least some color additives from food products over the next year or two.

In 2023, California banned four food additives, which has become a blueprint for copycat legislation in red states. And in October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill setting a legal definition of “ultraprocessed foods” that will also involve phasing them out of school cafeterias.

Last year, Texas led the way on SNAP changes by outlawing the use of SNAP benefits to buy candy or drinks with high sugar content. Six states then gained federal approval to pursue similar legislation, and 18 others have or will enact copycat laws this year. Additionally, some states have reported big declines in SNAP enrollment.

Beyond state-level changes, some see a full-scale reorganization of federal health agencies and guidance as a must.

Writing for Heritage Foundation (Lean Right), Robert Moffit, PhD and Senior Research Fellow on Health and Welfare Policy, argued that the Trump administration should take “bold steps to transform federal public health agencies.”

“Secretary Kennedy’s agenda to have the CDC focus on its core mission of protecting the public from communicable disease is the first great step in preparation for the next national medical emergency,” he suggested. “The FDA must open all of its files on vaccine safety and effectiveness data, including information received from vaccine manufacturers, and improve the reporting of adverse vaccine events. Pursuant to the President’s executive order, the NIH must not only halt viral gain-of-function research, but also undertake a comprehensive review of such research as well as its multibillion-dollar grant programs. All agencies must ensure that none of their employees are compromised by a conflict of interest.”

Fox News (Right) columnist Mary Katherine Ham argued that MAHA “taps into something real that appeals to people across income, racial and party lines: Americans are exhausted by chronic disease, ultra-processed food and rising childhood obesity. A broad spectrum of parents is also concerned about increased screen time, social media use and their effects on children’s mental health.”

But she urged caution on broader changes: “When the conversation turns to limiting access to common medications like Tylenol during pregnancy, broadly casting doubt on vaccines or heavy-handed censorship of healthcare information through avenues like drug ads, which creates speech concerns, the political calculus changes — fast.”

Others were even more skeptical.

Sociologist Pamela Herd, in an article titled “MAHA Will Not Make Americans Healthy Again,” said the Trump administration is “consolidating power and actively politicizing the federal health bureaucracy, undermining scientific expertise and agency independence in the process.”

According to Ipsos (Center), mental health and obesity – two core focuses for MAHA – are of the highest concern for Americans when it comes to overall wellness:

Can GLP-1s measure up to general lifestyle changes?

GLP-1s, according to some doctors, have revolutionized medicine when it comes to weight loss and management; however, most experts agree that the medication cannot completely replace lifestyle changes. Evidence from studies published in the National Library of Medicine found that patients yield the best, and most long-term, results when using GLP-1s as a complement to overall lifestyle changes.

According to Intermountain Health, a nonprofit health system servicing western mountainous states such as Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, GLP-1 medications help address biological weight factors that more traditional weight loss methods don’t help with, making the medication useful for a wider variety of patients who struggle with weight and weight-related conditions. A UC Davis study found that GLP-1s led to about 15-20% weight loss in trial patients, compared to 5-10% weight loss from previous medications available. In addition to weight loss, UC Davis found that GLP-1 medications also reduced the risk of cardiovascular events, lowered blood sugar, and controlled diabetes. Other studies found GLP-1s even helped with fatty liver disease.

Like most medications, GLP-1s come with side effects, the most common of which are nausea, fatigue, dizziness, or muscle loss if patients are not eating enough. The medication can also be cost-prohibitive, costing potentially hundreds of dollars per month for insured patients, or even $1,000 a month for uninsured patients.

Lifestyle changes, on the other hand, come at a lower financial cost and with fewer physical side effects, but take longer to yield results.

Where do critics of medicine, psychiatry, and MAHA overlap?

Antipsychiatry has a long history, but for the first time the MAHA movement is implementing some of their desired reforms in mainstream medicine through moving to deprescribe antidepressants and fast tracking alternative mental health treatments like psychedelics.

However, the relationship between antipsychiatry and MAHA is an uneasy one because much of psychiatric criticism comes from the left, which sees the MAHA movement as dangerous in other ways, such as its promotion of vaccine skepticism.

Criticism of psychiatry comes from all sides of the political spectrum. Those on the right may be more likely to believe that pharmaceuticals should rarely be used in the treatment of mental illness and favor natural approaches and lifestyle changes.

On the left the critique is often rooted in philosophers like Michel Foucault and Thomas Szaz, who argue that psychiatry is a mechanism of social control and that medicalizing mental suffering is a categorical error. Though not all Foucauldians, who believe in challenging the system of social control, necessarily adopt the Szazian viewpoint that mental diagnosis essentially isn’t real. Then, there are people who have experienced iatrogenic harm from mental health medications and their criticisms may overlap with the left, right, or be largely apolitical.

Left-wing antipsychiatry movements have been organizing for a long time under the banners of mad pride and mad liberation. For example, the Mad in America mission statement is “Mad in America’s mission is to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad). We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society, and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.” Now, finally some of the goals of the antipsychiatry and iatrogenic harm movements are being realized, but the catch is that many left-wing advocates don’t want to be used to achieve MAHA’s ends.

Sascha Altman DuBrul, who has spent decades working in peer support for those experiencing extreme mental states, madness, and “dangerous gifts” as he calls them, said, "what do we do when our analysis gets picked up by people whose politics we find dangerous? How do we hold onto the legitimate critique without becoming useful to a project we oppose?" Many critics and skeptics on the left have felt the need to strongly resist being looped in with MAHA.

DuBrul added, “It's one thing to tell people not to take anti-depressants, and convince doctors to start de-prescribing. It's another thing to put financial resources into alternative services that people can use outside of the biomedical model. They're just doing the first one. This feels like a microcosm of the right wing strategy to defund care, it's like a replay of deinstitutionalization from the 70s. All these people in the movement I've been a part of for two decades are excited by these changes but I feel like they're going to be sorely disappointed when s*** keeps getting worse despite seeming getting something we've been fighting for all these years.”

Dr. Awais Aftab, a psychiatrist and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University wrote, “[MAHA] ideas are a dangerous mix of respectable science, fringe science, and pseudoscience… ‘Overmedicalization’ and ‘overprescribing’ are popular and sympathetic causes — who could really be against them? — and they function as the moderate-sounding entry points to an underlying program that, if stated plainly, would lose most of its public support.”

“If someone doesn’t even believe in the reality of mental illness, I don’t quite think they can be seen as having valid concerns about ‘overdiagnosis,’ when, by the logic of their own framework, every diagnosis is overdiagnosis. If someone doesn’t even think medications have clinically meaningful efficacy, their complaints about ‘overtreatment’ sound rather odd.”

Antidepressants, psychedelics, and mental health treatment don’t map onto partisan left-right ideologies with both supporters and critics on the left and right, but because the issues are now tied to specific administrative actions they’ve become seen as partisan. How will the antipsychiatry movement respond as some of them find themselves suddenly allied with those they don’t want to be on the same side as?

How beneficial are artificial products to overall health?

Americans have never stopped searching for the perfect diet. From “low-fat” and “sugar-free” to calorie counting; from keto and carnivore to Mediterranean diets, each generation has chased new nutritional guidelines to help achieve its health goals. This has left many consumers wondering what “eating healthy” actually means.

Products marked “diet” and “light” are now offered in grocery stores across the country. One of the most common are artificial sweeteners. While agencies like the FDA consider artificial sweeteners safe in moderation, newer studies are questioning its long-term effects on things like reproductive health and gut function.

Sweeteners and sugar substitutes like aspartame, sucralose and stevia can be helpful for reducing calorie intake and managing blood sugar. But new research is increasingly connecting them to health conditions like gut microbiome disruptions, potential cardiovascular risks, and associations with some cancers.

In July 2023, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives concluded that aspartame was a “possible carcinogenic to humans.” Following this finding, the World Health Organization (WHO) released guidelines that recommended against using non-sugar sweeteners to manage personal health, citing additional research that showed they may increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

One caveat that many researchers have noted is that much of the research raising concerns around artificial sweeteners have been performed on animals and that fewer human-specific studies exist.

Nonetheless, artificial sweeteners are still considered processed foods, which have been increasingly linked to chronic diseases, systemic inflammation, neurobehavioral issues and metabolic disorders. In 2025, Johns Hopkins University found that nearly 75% of the US food supply was estimated to be ultra-processed (UPF), including many products labeled “reduced-fat” and “sugar free.” In 2023, it was estimated that 60% of foods purchased in the US contained technical food additives like coloring or flavoring agents, preservatives and sweeteners. One of the emerging concerns around UPFs is their potential link to colorectal cancer among young adults, which is now the second leading cause of cancer death in the US.

The Johns Hopkins study also noted, however, that not all UPFs are created equal. It reported that whole grain breads, many yogurts, instant oatmeal and jarred pasta are some examples of UPFs, but have lower levels of saturated fats and added sugars while still containing many nutrients that help reduce disease risk. Similarly, a clinical review by researchers from Boston Medical Center and Geisinger Health System found that while artificial sweeteners have been shown to negatively impact the gastrointestinal system, it did not link them to cancer risk.

Overall, a diet that’s roughly 80-90% whole and minimally processed foods, including artificial sweeteners, is what most nutrition experts would consider realistic and healthy.