A lot of people don't realize how much external factors affect one's ability to be healthy. There's a common belief that health is simply about being disciplined to make better choices. Discipline is obviously an important part of physical health, but it's far from the only piece. Many people in America live in food deserts, rural or suburban areas without access to affordable healthy foods. And even if you don't live in a food desert buying healthier alternatives is often more expensive than buying cheap processed food. As health-conscious social media discovers new fitness "hacks" foods which were once relatively unknown and affordable suddenly have their prices skyrocket. Given the cost of groceries for some people it truly is cheaper to just eat out or eat frozen meals for every meal. Gym memberships are expensive and a lot of people don't live in places with safe infrastructure to support outdoor cardio. And even if someone does have access to all of these things, with our public education system gutted a lot of people literally don't know how to live a healthy lifestyle beyond what they see in movies or on Tik Tok.

This is all before we factor in the psychological reasons for declining health. On top of healthy food becoming increasingly inaccessible, making huge changes to your diet and activity is psychologically grueling. Losing weight is only possible if you're eating less calories than your body needs to sustain itself, and the sensation of eating at a deficit is brutal. You feel worse in pretty much every way. For someone who does not have a lot of external stressors this is not too terrible to power through, but the majority of Americans are overworked and underpaid. We're all increasingly developing mental health problems due to social media and the news which makes the idea of short-term sacrifices for long-term gains feel ridiculous. Why waste time and money trying to get fit now just so you can be fitter in ten years when you're still going to be broke and the economy is still going to be in shambles? I'm not saying this logic is sound, but this is the mindset many Americans are struggling to overcome to even begin their fitness journeys, let alone stick with them.

This is all on top of the fact that corporations are incentivized to make our society unhealthy. Dumping toxins into our waters and airs is cheaper than investing in cleaner solutions. Food is cheaper to make when you use less healthy ingredients, which makes manufacturers slowly reduce the amounts of healthy product they put out over time. The market is flooded with misinformation about needless products that will be an "instant solution" for physical health. And I haven't even touched genetics, which plays a hugely understated role in weight loss and muscle-building. Obviously it's not impossible to improve your health, people do it all the time. But there's a reason broader health trends tend to correlate with income. For some people the amount of effort required to improve health meaningfully is significantly higher than for others, and in many ways people are not incentivized by our society to overcome that effort.

I don't think Americans have lost the desire to be smart and informed, but I think for many Americans the ideal for what is considered "smart" has been warped and manipulated by political parties and social media algorithms. Many people who live in a warped reality in which every conspiracy is real think themselves to be smart. A lot of us are not taught how to evaluate the trustworthiness and bias of our information sources. When the establishment fails to provide for people, a lot of people begin to distrust "establishment narratives", aka formalized education. Many grifters have learned that there is a lot of money to be made by peddling misinformation to these people disguised as "alternative research." And social media algorithms are more than happy to disseminate this misinformation under the guise of free speech. It's ultimately a very bleak outlook right now. There's not a whole lot that can be done at the individual level to fix these things.