Almost 70% of US Adults Would Be Deemed Obese Based on New Definition, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 142
Almost 70% of adults in the US would be deemed to have obesity based on a new definition, research suggests. From a report: The traditional definition of obesity, typically based on having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or greater, has long been contentious, not least as it does not differentiate between fat and muscle.
In an effort to tackle the issue, in January medical experts from around the world called for a new definition to be adopted. This would encompass people either with a BMI greater than 40; or those with a high BMI and at least one raised figure for measures such as waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, or waist-to-height ratio; or those with two such raised figures regardless of BMI; or those with direct measures of excess body fat based on scans.
In addition, they said obesity should be split into two categories: clinical obesity -- where there are signs of illness -- and pre-clinical obesity, where there are not. Now research suggests the revamped definition could result in a dramatic rise in the prevalence of obesity among adults in the US.
In an effort to tackle the issue, in January medical experts from around the world called for a new definition to be adopted. This would encompass people either with a BMI greater than 40; or those with a high BMI and at least one raised figure for measures such as waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, or waist-to-height ratio; or those with two such raised figures regardless of BMI; or those with direct measures of excess body fat based on scans.
In addition, they said obesity should be split into two categories: clinical obesity -- where there are signs of illness -- and pre-clinical obesity, where there are not. Now research suggests the revamped definition could result in a dramatic rise in the prevalence of obesity among adults in the US.
Hegseth can't start a draft because (Score:2)
...almost nobody would qualify. Besides, I have bone spurs, my bribed doctor said so.
A simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
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Charge by the pound for transportation such as airfare.
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Some airlines actually do that.
Airlines in the South Pacific who run small planes charge large customers by weight. (They have an excess number of large customers.)
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Just tax it. Tax overweight people at a higher tax rate to offset their inevitable health problems.
Uh, that only works if we're being provided healthcare via the tax money. And that's communism. This is America. We'll just tax 'em hard and use that money to give tax cuts to billionaires.
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That isn't a solution.
We're not looking for solutions. We're looking for punishments. That's what America is all about.
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That is one way to price healthy food further and further out of budget.
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Re: A simple solution (Score:2)
The law of unintended consequences
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American can't even figure out how to apply basic taxes to keep their infrastructure from crumbling, what makes you think they could tax obesity?
Re: A simple solution (Score:2)
Perfect. And when they're taxed, they won't have enough money left for all the eating out and junk, fast food.
Socioeconomic factors. (Score:3)
Tax overweight people at a higher tax rate {...}
The problem is that overweight people are more likely to come from lower socioeconomic levels. (i.e.: obesity rate are high among poorer people).
So you're putting additional financial burden on people who are already struggling financially.
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Tax overweight people at a higher tax rate {...}
The problem is that overweight people are more likely to come from lower socioeconomic levels. (i.e.: obesity rate are high among poorer people). So you're putting additional financial burden on people who are already struggling financially.
They might be from a country with socialized medical care, in America taxes don’t pay for your health care. Insurance is already headed back to pre-existing conditions meaning you get to use insurance once, for a limited time then are uncovered for the remainder of your life
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What if that obese person is rich? We shouldn't tax them because that's what communists do.
Even better, if a person is rich then it shouldn't be possible to categorize them as obese. I would violate their right to a free lunch.
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In truth rich people are far less likely to be obese. And of course when they are overweight they can afford to get help, including drugs and surgery. And they can afford a healthy lifestyle in the first place, where many poor cannot.
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I hear a lot of excuses going on here for people skipping the produce aisle and hitting up the frozen aisle instead. Most grocery stores, especially big box stores, have a produce section and it's not that unreasonable in price. A great deal of that ultra processed stuff isn't cheap either.
People are just lazy. I totally understand. As someone that lives alone, it sucks cooking and cleaning up all the time with no help. Just by adding one more person, it means I can justify cooking because it's now not just
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The frozen food aisle also contains frozen vegetables so you don't find a mass of what used to be broccoli in the refrigerator.
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Like how we tax cigarettes eh. Where the tax will hit the people who have the least capability to pay it the most. From my experience obesity is higher among poorer people. They can't afford to eat fresh food, so they rely on cheaper processed foods. They often live in urban deserts, in poorer neighborhoods with fewer parks and open spaces. They can't afford to work out at a gym club either. Either because of time or money. They aren't inherently lazy, either. They often work two jobs to make ends mee
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Often it's already financial pressure that leads to them being obese in the first place. Lack of time and money to eat well and exercise, for example.
Your proposal would just make things worse.
Re: A simple solution (Score:2)
Does that also apply to people eating too much meat for their health? That's a lot of people...
What about (Score:2)
A 30-minute pretreatment with curcumin reduced mitochondrial coupling efficiency by 17.0 ± 0.4% https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
A caveat, restoring mitochondria can reactivate latent virus/cancer? Many cancer approaches work via ampk, which requires low energy (lots more ADP than ATP). Some cancers / viruses come back / reactivate / exit latency when their energy levels are restored.
Put Ozempic in the water supply (Score:2)
Or on a slightly more practical note pull some FDA provisions that allow you to run up the patent and get some GLP-1 drugs into generic manufacturing and make it a fully covered thing. Over years and decades it would easily save probably hundreds of billions in healthcare costs.
Speaking at least of my homeland of America it's a goddamned tradition for us to pay and drug our problems away, we're definitely not going to wholesale change our diet and habits.
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Good luck. Health insurance companies won't pay for the drug, what makes you think that the government would?
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It's not expensive to make. Buying out the patent would make it affordable.
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drug our problems away, we're definitely not going to wholesale change our diet and habits.
Technically these drugs do change your diet and habits - that's what most of the weight loss comes from. Eating poorly for a while causes a mass die-off of bacteria in your digestive tract that helps with digesting healthy and fiber-rich foods. Those same bacteria actually release their own GLP-1 agonists. We can probably do better than these medications but they aren't a cheap gimmick either - these are drugs that try to make your body function as if it doesn't have a metabolic disorder and it drives be
Ozempic needs to be injected (Score:2)
RFK Jr. has the solution (Score:4, Funny)
Become a heroin addict for 14 years https://www.pbs.org/newshour/h... [pbs.org]
You'll lose weight.
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You want to lose weight with drugs? What you want is Crank. https://therecover.com/what-is... [therecover.com]
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It's caused by eating circumcised foreskins.
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here's a link outside paywall (Score:2)
I mean, look around. (Score:3)
Re:I mean, look around. (Score:5, Informative)
Almost 70% of US Adults Would Be Deemed Obese Based on New Definition, Study Finds
Only 70% of US Adults Would Be Deemed Obese Based on New Definition, Study Finds
FTFY :)
Re: I mean, look around. (Score:2)
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Real.
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Much of the body positivity movement just says you shouldn't be mean to fat people, or anyone else, because of their body shape. That's what the words mean: body positivity.
There are some crazy body positivity types who actually claim that any amount of obesity is just fine and has no adverse health implications at all, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary (although I haven't met any that think anorexia is cool). That is indeed RFK Jr style crazy.
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"Much" is a bit of an exaggeration from my personal experience -- that movement was very hostile and actual preaching obesity as a virtue. Like "fat pride" and "healthy at any weight". It reached a level of toxicity where people attempting to lose weight were actually shamed and called traitors by the movement for a failure of solidarity. Like I get what you're saying it should
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"being unhealthy is okay" is not a good message, but "you don't have to feel like shit because your health issues make you heavier" shouldn't be controversial. Unfortunately deciding what category someone is in by eyesight is nigh impossible.
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Correction: _determining_ the category (accurately) is impossible. _deciding_ is all too easy.
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I think people just have trouble with the connotation of obese
What's the connotation of fucking fat bastards?
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Unintentional Austin Powers reference. Love it.
You young people wouldn't know this.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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And then they would be denied health insurance?
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Please, please, please... (Score:3)
the revamped definition will NOT result in a dramatic rise in the prevalence of obesity. It will only change the perception and statistics.
Understand?
Homer Simpson With A Large Foam Finger (Score:2)
"We're number 1, we're number 1!"
So John Cena is obese? (Score:3, Insightful)
I am sure John Cena is a tubbo based on BMI....but most would consider him quite the opposite of obese.
Obesity is a very tough problem to solve. The medical community has failed us for a long time. So few doctors have anything but a one-size-fits-all approach to weight management which works for most, but fails drastically for many who are in the greatest need. A lot of fatties, are like those in my family who carry the obesity gene. What works for a normal person who puts on weight from overeating fails for them....cut your calories and workout?...well...it helps...but if you have the obesity gene, it will grab every calorie it can and even break down your lean tissue to keep at your equilibrium weight....cut your calories by 50%?...you'll lose weight for a year and your body will just shut down functions until it gets to it's target fat level (in my case, it's about 25%). This happens for everyone in my family and many fat people I know who take dieting seriously. They're not the fattest people you know...they're just slightly overweight their whole life, despite eating and exercising like psychos.
Shit like this BMI stupidity just illustrates the incompetence of the medical establishment. Weight loss should be a dedicated medical discipline, like orthopedics. If you can't even measure someone's obesity correctly, how can you be trusted to treat it with the nuance that makes it effective for your patient, not a broad general model that may not apply to the patient in question?
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Convenience is why we use BMI. Measuring body fat percentage directly is a bit of a pain. The technology is there to do it in a doctor's office (there are several ways). But when height and weight are already taken with patient vitals, the BMI is basically a free number.
Sometimes BMI does correlate with body fat percentage, but sometimes it's way off. It's both a great metric because it's simple, but also a terrible metric because it frequently misrepresents patients and cannot paint a complete picture of h
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BMI is not bullshit.
Statistically it's pretty good. 95% accurate for men and 99% accurate for women when predicting obesity.
Now of course we know every Slashdotter is a muscle bound gym bro rocking 2% with a BMI of 80.
Thing is BMI is pretty accurate, easy to measure with very common equipment and hard to cheat. If you know better and can do better, great, do so. But how many of those 5% for whom BMI is wrong do you think are already taking regular exercise and have some knowledge about what they are doing?
T
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It does not account for body shape. It does not account for sex (females have a natural higher level of body fat!).
It does not distinct between muscles and fat.
If you are a women who works out regularly it is very easy to get above BMI 25! (but below 30)
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It is far from accurate. Yeah the obese flag is most of the time correct
You're literally contradicting yourself there. And given this article is on obesity... if BMI says you're obese, you probably are. It's in the 70s for overweight, which again is not bad.
If your BMI indicates obese, you should definitely check. If it says you're overweight you should probably check. Here's a study:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... [nih.gov]
You can see the correlations between body fat % and BMI. It's a pretty good correlation and
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Because bodyfat is relatively difficult to measure. BMI was never intended to be used as more than an initial screening tool or for population-wide studies (where the small number of athletes has a relatively minor effect). It's not supposed to be a diagnosis in and of itself. The people who started using it fully understood that athletes and bodybuilders don't fit into it. The medical establishment (i.e. Doctors) aren't going to tell their bodybuilder patients to lose weight.
The only problem is when BMI is
New definitions won't change a thing (Score:2)
What we need is sanctions on fast food companies.
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What we need is sanctions on fast food companies.
That might be a start, but I suspect it is a wider problem.
In modern America (and increasingly in other countries), you need to go out of your way to get exercise and eat healthily. If you lapse, you revert to a default of what is available, which is high in sugar and fat, and a life of sitting down.
And it's not intrinsically an American problem, it is a modern American problem. The attendees at Woodstock were not obese.
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So going down the produce aisle instead of the frozen food aisle is now considered "going out of your way". Whatever. I'm sure your excuses will serve you well.
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So going down the produce aisle instead of the frozen food aisle is now considered "going out of your way". Whatever. I'm sure your excuses will serve you well.
You're right to point out that it is quite possible to choose your isle wisely, and select healthy food. The fact that my comment sounded like I was making excuses is down to my poor choice of phrase.
This is my observation - If you give a nation a few decades of junk food and suburban living, people will start to default to it, much like a man who leans against a wall rather than standing up straight.
There is the option to go to the gym, but exercise is no longer something that happens in the natural course
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What we need are walkable cities, and *safe* bike paths, and a lot more sidewalks. We need to make it extremely expensive to live in suburbs. (We also need to make it extremely expensive to own SUVs and other large vehicles.) We need to change zoning laws so a grocery store doesn't have to be somewhere you need to drive to. We need to kill parking minimums. Huge vast amounts of space in the US are completely wasted with empty parking lots. We need public transit and I am talking about trains and trams first
a growing trend (Score:2)
We don't like the conclusion, so change the metrics by which we came to the conclusion.
A bit like "Our students can't pass the standardized test, so instead of fixing our education system we're going to dumb down the tests."
Same principle. Don't like the results? Change the test!
Finally! (Score:2)
We can get rid of that wasteful food bank!
Re:Moving the goalposts. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Moving the goalposts. (Score:5, Funny)
Or if they actually moved those goalposts. Those things are heavy.
hang on I need to catch my breath (Score:3)
Don't normally walk this far.
Re: Moving the goalposts. (Score:2)
Goalposts remind me of golden brown french fries. I think Iâ(TM)ll order the extra large and reward myself for being sedentary all day. I did blink and moves my mouse some.
Re:Moving the goalposts. (Score:5, Funny)
Those things are heavy.
The goalposts? Or Americans?
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One thing life has taught me (Score:2, Insightful)
Basically in America we don'
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There are other forms of crazy that also motivate self-cutting. Some forms of dissociative identity disorder include strong feelings of being fake, as in not a real person. One might think they are a robot or an animated manikin or similar. Of course this sounds unrealistic (and unlikely) to most of us because we don't experience this. But for people who suffer these episodes, they are extremely disturbing.
So they cut themselves to see their own blood. It helps alleviate the anxiety of the condition.
So my point is we do the really obvious stuff (Score:2)
The only kind of crazy we care about is the kind where somebody might hurt us. We don't care about helping other people in the slightest.
Which would be fine cuz human beings are dirty stinking animals but it is literally cheaper to be a good person and ta
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It's not obvious overeating that is the issue for most. Most people are forced into relatively sedentary careers with long commutes, and it's worse the more education you have. An excess 100 calories a day adds up to 10 lbs of weight gain a year. It doesn't even take much activity to reverse that deficit. And then if you have kids, there is pressure to always be carting them around from one after-school activity to another. A home-cooked meal is unlikely because there is no time. Even if you want to e
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Because working from home would be completely different with the refrigerator only feet away or not having to do much more than roll out of bed.
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at least working at home you can take the time you're not commuting and do something else
how many folks actually do so, I do not know
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If all you look for is burgers and fries that's all you'll find. It's easy in most towns and cities to find Mexican, Italian or Chinese take out if you just make a little effort, and other ethnic foods as well once you're living in a real city. All you have to do is look.
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It's easy in most towns and cities to find Mexican, Italian or Chinese take out
Which may often be even less healthy than a burger and fries. Beans are healthy, refried beans not so much. Vegetables are healthy, stir fried vegetables often are mostly fat and that pasta sauce is probably mostly fat as well. The reason in all three cases is that fat adds calories that fill people up and is fairly cheap. Making a healthy meal low in fat that makes people full is expensive.
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I don't know where, if anywhere, you learned stir frying [wikipedia.org],but done properly you only use a small amount of oil, which is why Asian dishes are rarely greasy, and if that pasta sauce is mostly fat, there's something wrong because those sauces traditionally consist mostly of vegetables.
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but done properly you only use a small amount of oil, which is why Asian dishes are rarely greasy
You need to go to an old-fashioned American chinese restaurant. You are right, you don't need to use a lot of fat, but people like fat and it fills them up.
those sauces traditionally consist mostly of vegetables.
So do french fries.
Re: Moving the goalposts. (Score:2)
You know people actually need calories to live, even when you need to lose weight (especially protein, so you don't catabolize muscle).
cars. (Score:3)
{...} into relatively sedentary careers with long commutes, and it's worse the more education you have. {...} And then if you have kids, there is pressure to always be carting them around from one after-school activity to another.
tl;dr It's a cultural problem, but it's not generally an eating or self control problem.
I agree on the "cultural" problem part, though my own impression is that the insane-level of car-centricity also plays a role.
contrast: I also have a high education and a computer desktop job. I do spend 1 hour commuting each day by bicycle. Here around it's much more bike-able than in the US. Lots of parents here around have cargo bikes, kid seats, etc. to bring their kids (and I'll probably invest into something similar once our daughter is old enough for after-school activities). Whenever my wife plays t
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I agree on the "cultural" problem part, though my own impression is that the insane-level of car-centricity also plays a role.
That IS a cultural problem, and a very very deep seated one.
contrast: I also have a high education and a computer desktop job. I do spend 1 hour commuting each day by bicycle. Here around it's much more bike-able than in the US.
Mine's a little over. The great things are: it's the fastest way to work for me, I need a grand total of 5 minutes of motivation per day to get a decent amoun
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That's just begging for a "yo momma" joke...
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Not the first time. The standards for BMI were changed in the 90s, creating millions of new obese people to sell weight loss drugs to.
No goalposts moved (Score:3)
Deaths from heart attacks have gone down over the last few decades (even in the US). But more people than ever suffer from chronic heart disease.
Is it a scam to sell pharmaceuticals, or just a consequence of addressing the immediate life-threatening condition without getting to the root cause?
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It could be a per capita versus absolute number thing. If you report in only absolute numbers, then of course more people have heart disease today then any time in the past, as our population continues to grow.
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When you change the cutoff overweight from 27.5 to 25, the absolute number of people who are now overweight will go up.
It's not rocket science.
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There are several studies that show that people who are in the BMI category of "Normal" have a shorter life expectancy than people who are "Overweight."
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This is because weight loss is often a side effect of chronic or terminal illness. When you control for that, the impact goes away.
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The fact that BMI categories do not take into account age, or sex, is one, or rather two, of the biggest reasons why it's so deeply flawed. Any standard that says that men and women of the same height should have the same weight is dangerous quackery.
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dude what?
There are different charts/thresholds for age and sex, even ethnic groups.
Re:Moving the goalposts. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah it is, just moving them to the obvious place they should be. But hey that's medicine for you. We learn things and move the goalposts to where they provide a meaningful medical basis for making decisions and treating people. You can thank those goal posts not being stuck in place for living in a time where the average life expectancy is where it is now.
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Wah, BMI is a stupid measure because I am all muscles!
Okay, we came up with much better criteria based on clinically validated measures like waist to hip ratio.
Wah, moving the goalposts! Now pass me the cheetos.
False dichotomy actually (Score:3)
From NIMH:
Any mental illness (AMI) is defined as a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder. AMI can vary in impact, ranging from no impairment to mild, moderate, and even severe impairment (e.g., individuals with serious mental illness as defined below).
Serious mental illness (SMI) is defined as a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder resulting in serious functional impairment, which substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities.
We could live in a world where the vast majority of people have some type of identifiable mental illness, but isn't impaired or debilitated by it.
Statistically, we can look at populations with some identify condition. Such as obesity, hypertension, etc and make a statistical connection to likely outcomes in those groups. Even if an individual is not impaired or at put at risk by their obesity, a significant number of people in the same group are at an elevated risk if not already impaired.
It's wro
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In the old days one either vented mental issues by beating the shit out of their own family, and/or becoming a babbling religious nut.
The true overachievers did both!