Initial Life Sequenzy coming to you live from Houston, Texas, home to the
world's largest medical center. Bunch everything looking ability. This is your Health First,
the most beneficial health program on radio with doctor Joe Gallotti. During the
next hour, you'll learn about health, wellness and the prevention of disease.
Now here's your host, doctor Joe Bellotti. Well, a good Sunday evening
to everybody. Doctor Joe Galotti. It's Sunday evening and the only place you're
supposed to be is locked in in front of your radio or smart device,
I pad, iPhone, whatever you communicate with these days. That's where we
are broadcasting from our world headquarters in Houston, Texas and around the globe on
the iHeartRadio app. So glad to be here every Sunday evening. And I
tell everybody that with all that I do during the week, let's say the
real job, the doctoring part, taking care of patients with liver disease,
liver transplant, all totally exciting and the really dissatisfaction of taking care of our
patients and their families and their loved ones. Coming on the radio is a
highlight of the week for me because it's an opportunity to communicate with more than
one person in an exam room or a hospital room. We profess here that
the majority of chronic disease that we're all plagued by, and you know,
the sort of a dirty dozen, it is obesity, it is high blood
pressure, high cholesterol, fatty liver, cirrhosis, alcoholism, mental health issues,
cancer, So many of these can be modified with life style adjustments.
Okay, there are diseases that you were born with, genetically programmed, no
matter what, you were going to be afflicted by it. But the data
is there eighty five percent of the chronic disease that we see, the disease
that you may be suffering, is related to lifestyle choices. All right,
this segment is going to be a little short because we have met Share coming
up from the New York Times last week and the New York Times magazine.
He had a great article on automobile fatalities. And this is near and dear
to me in view of the fact that I was a victim back in nineteen
ninety one to a near fatal car crash with a drunk driver. The title
of the article is why are American drivers so deadly? Great? Insight great
article, and Matt will be on in just a few minutes. The one
word I wanted to share with you today is health span. Now, health
span is different than lifespan. Lifespan is how long you will live. Health
Span is the amount of time that you have a high quality of life,
that you are functioning. You are living on your own or able to take
care of yourself, and you're not plagued or shackled by really severe crime disease
and out on dialysis. You don't have any neurocognitive problems. You're able to
walk and exercise and eat, et cetera, et cetera. And the focus
for all of us in this thinking about life span, and we'll be talking
more about it than the weeks to come, is that you have to start
planning now. You may be twenty or thirty years old, but you need
to plan for when you're sixty or seventy. Are you going to be confined
to a wheelchair, to a nursing home, unable to take care of yourself,
or have a real vibrant life where you're able to do all the fun
things that you want to do, be it go fishing, hang out with
your grandkids, hang out with your wife or significant other. But that's just
sort of a new framework that we're trying to work on here with the program.
So I know this is little short, but Matt Share is on hold
and we're beginning him in a minute. Don't forget Doctor Joe Galotti dot com
is our website. Stay tuned, buckle in for this one. We'll be
right back every Sunday evening between just the hour of seven and a pm.
We're here trying to raise everybody's health IQ. I'm doctor Joe Galotti. Don't
forget doctor Joegalotti dot com is our website. And as I was saying a
little earlier in the program, a wonderful article that was published last week in
the New York Times magazine and the official title of it, let me just
get it straight here, why are American drivers so deadly? After decades of
declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again. And we're very lucky to
have the author of that article, Matthew Sure coming in from Atlanta. Matt,
welcome to the program, and thanks for taking a little time to share
some wisdom here with everybody. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm honored.
Well, let me let me just get to a quick question. You've
been writing for the New York Times magazine for a while. How many how
many articles have you had published over the years. Ooh, that's a good
one, and I should know the answer now. You could brag and say
too many to count, but I would imagine it's probably about fifteen or sixteen,
maybe maybe more. They take a long time these magazine articles to report,
right to actually write, so they you know, they I do about
three a year, two to three a year. It would be harder to
do more than that. Wow, And uh, making it to the front
cover is probably also very awesome. It's it's that's an honor every time it
happens, too, and you hope that you know, it's not always about
the content of the article. Sometimes it's about the content of the article,
but sometimes it's about what you can illustrate and what the editor is, what
kind of topic they want out front, and what kind of statement or impact
they want to make sure. It's always great to have. So when we
opened up last weeks New York Times and we go right to the magazine section,
this is there. And I would think that this is a topic that
in some way or another is near and dear to everybody, whether or not
you have fallen victim to a family or friend that expired, died in a
car crash, you yourself have been injured, or you just are concerned about
the craziness of what's happening on the road. So it drew my attention,
and right away I reached out and I said, I need to get you
on because really we talk about health and the name of the program is your
health first, which everybody knows. But driving safety, your personal safety for
yourself your family, is within the domain of what we talk about. So
how did you come upon writing the article? Tell us for a moment how
that happened. I lived down in Atlanta, where I have been for about
the past eight years, give or take, and I have two young kids,
they're eight and four years old. And the genesis of this article is
the same reason I think that most people do have reached out to me after
this piece came out, which is that I just got really scared about what
I was seeing on the roads, specifically tailgating, which is a major problem
in Atlanta, speeding, weaving in and Audelaine's the Traffic I am one of
the lucky few, and I'm knocking on wood right now who has not been
in the serious crash. But you're right, of course, it's increasingly,
you know, you increasingly don't meet people who don't have a firsthand familiarity with
some kind of crash, whether severe or not. And everybody, everybody has
stories of running into what can only be termed insanity on the roads. So
I kind of went into it as I think a lot of journalists do.
They see something firsthand and they think, this feels like a problem to me
personally, and it feels like a problem to other people that I've spoken to
about it. And then you the way that this actually became an article as
I was talking to my editor about the next potential assignment and the data head.
This is about a year ago now, and the data had just come
out, and this secretary people to judge had given a speech about the uptick
in car fatalities, comparing it to gun deaths and so on, and so
you know, at that point, okay, it's not just anecdote, it's
it's backed up by statistics. Then there's the challenge of trying to make it
compelling for people to read. But that's That's how it started. And you
know, the next step after that was finding someone who could help embody it
and as kind of a doctor and like yourself, and a professor who works
out in Nevada. Deborah Cools is her name, and she has you know,
she does a lot of data, a lot of data stuff, and
she she does a lot of work in the er and her two specialties,
as it happens, are gunshot wounds and car crashes. So she's been studying
both for a long time. And you know, she treats spatients who come
in with these kind of injuries, and then she also tracks the data.
And she was sort of a you know, as I say in the piece,
she was a bell. Whether's the wrong word, but she had watched
she's in her sixties now, I believe, and she had watched it sort
of get progressively worse and then explode at the time of COVID in terms of
fatality. So she was a good place to be here. Yeah. Yeah,
And all of the references, the experts that you had were outstanding.
And so share tonight with everyone at probably a thirty thousand foot view the statistics
that the trends and you make you know, you start off back in the
forties and fifties, through the sixties and seventies, and then jump to current
times. So what is the main take home and the scary part of these
statistics. Yeah, you know, the history lesson that I had to give
myself in writing this article was a little bit about early automobile history, but
really about the fifties and sixties. In the fifties and sixties, which is
I'm forty two, it's a little before my time. But in the late
fifties, people started saying, oh my god, these cars are not safe
right there. The gas tanks are exploding, right, people are being impaled
by stealing steering columns, everything wrong that could happen. You know, the
roofs weren't strong enough, and so what eventually happens. And this is how
Ralph Nader became famous, right, that is how he made his name.
People came along and said, the automobile industry is failing Americans. They're not
building cars to safe enough standards. And this big bill gets passed in Congress
right in the mid sixties. And you know the kind of bill that frankly
probably wouldn't be passed today. It was passed by liberal Congress that passed the
Civil Rights Act, right, it was, it was around that same time,
and this bill said cars car manufacturers are responsible for the safety of the
vehicles introduced, and so all this is important. That it's a little long
winded, but all this is important because after this bill gets passed, you
know, it doesn't happen right away, but in the seventies and eighties and
nineties, cars get progressively much much safer. Right. It's better seatbelts,
airbags, even you know, the steel itself is reinforced to prevent you know,
the sort of caving in and certain parts of the car. All of
that makes cars dramatically safer. So when you're looking at the sort of you
know, x Y access access chart of car fee comedies, you see this,
you know, big downhill slope after the seventies, and it's sort of
plateaus, and then you get up to what twenty ten, right, and
the cars are getting really safe. They've got all the safety technology, and
then they've got they're starting to have all the sensors and curtain airbags on the
side and so on. And then you get to COVID and things just explode,
and you know, It's interesting because car our country has always had a
problem with recks on our roads and carcat so even when we're talking about plateaus
or shrinking fatality rates, we're still we were still higher than comparable countries in
Europe, for example, or in Australia. So it's still you know,
there's some quotes you can look back and people will still say in you know,
twenty ten, oh car crashes our way down, but it's still unacceptable,
which is true. But then then you get to twenty twenty and twenty
twenty one especially, and it's like something cracks open, right, something the
doctor who I use in the start of the story calls it a switch being
flipped, and get dramatically worse and they and a lot of that is rooted
in behavior. Clearly one of the I don't think I actually put this into
the teeth, and maybe it got cut and we're going through. But I
spoke to a guy who specializes in the study of anger, and he was
saying, you know, before twenty twenty or twenty twenty one, Americans didn't
habitually punch flight attendance. When they got out right, it's like that there
was something loosened right, something went a little bit wrong there. The screws
totally loosened up, they did. But you see it reflected across, you
know, all different parts of America. Bullying, gun violence, suicide,
races, drug use, and all of that were more stressed than ever too.
The American Psychological Association does this Stress in America test, they call it,
and they do it every year now. And you look at the last
three years, and it's just people are anxious and nervous and worried. They're
worried about their families, They're worried about the future of the country. They're
worried about inflation, they were worried about COVID. And you know again that
this gets reflected in different parts of our lives. But the car, as
one of these experts told me, it's basically the perfect place to let it
all out. The way this psychologists and researcher put it is, if he
wanted to invent a place to sort of provoke our anxious or our anxiousness or
our stress or our anger, you couldn't do better than a car. You
get out there. Traffic's bad, are commute is longer than it has ever
been in American history, and you are in a bubble. You can't really
see. Sometimes you catch glimpses of the person in the car, you know,
maybe what they look like, but really it's an object that you're interacting
with, and it just it triggers you in a way that even if you
go out saying, you know, serenity, now, I will not let
this affect me, it does affect you. And especially and this is where
it's coming back to where it started for me, especially if you have kids
in the car and you're thinking, like God, this is these people are
putting my family's lives and danger, and the anger gets to you. So
it's all of these things together. The very last part of this, of
course, is the sort of part that we will never be able to change,
which is that America has built itself in the shape of a car.
There are exceptions. There are cities around the country where you can use a
bicycle or you can walk in certain areas of that city. Well, for
the most part, everyone in America drives everywhere they go because they have to.
And you go through sort of sprawl of strip malls, and then you
get into rural areas where you have to drive because there's no public transportation,
and it's that part's not getting better, right. I mean, you can
again, you can do this in certain cities. You can try to roll
back some of this and allow more pedestrians and cyclists to be out on the
roads, but it's hard to imagine in a lot of parts of other parts
of the country. So it's just sort of where we're at. And there
are solutions, of course, but the sort of root problem is not one
that we're going to be able to dress. Right. We're on with Matt
Schaer from The New York Times had a great article about just road fatalities here
in America and some of the troubles that he uncovered. The name of the
program, Your Health First. Our website Doctor Jokealotti dot com. Stay tuned
for more health and wellness news. Don't move what We're right back. Welcome
back, everybody. I hope you haven't a great Sunday evening. I'm doctor
joke Altti to Your Health First. We are raising your Health IQ, one
listener at a time, every Sunday evening between seven and a pm. We're
here on a mission to make you better consumers, Keep you out of the
er, keep you healthy fighting chronic disease. Don't forget our website, doctor
Cholotti dot com. Of information there to look over, soner for our newsletter,
all of our social media is there, and there is even a way
to send me a message, doctor Jocolatti dot com. All right, we've
been on the phone with Matthew Schaer from the New York Times had a great
article about the deadly American drivers on the road, and it's a real,
real eye opener. I would say. Now, in the article, you
go through really chronologically, almost chapters in a sense, starting with the early
days, like you said, in the fifties and sixties, and then the
car safety became a major factor in reducing accidents and fatalities. Then you get
into COVID and what that switch. Everybody just became unglued. And I think
you're right. We never saw people beating up light attendance, or you know
the guy at the dunkin Donuts getting hot coffee thrown on him because he didn't
get the right jelly donut. I mean, everybody is just a hair away
from going postal. But one of the parts of the article that I liked
was based on some of the research where when we may be mister or missus
mild mannered behind the wheel, but if you're put into a stressful situation,
maybe people are honking behind you, we sort of do our worst instincts.
Tell everybody about that. There's this amazing study that I quote and the thief
is actually done in Lebanon, of all places, right, not in the
US, but it's very relevant to this discussion and very relevant to what you
just said about our behavior. And the study I won't go through the whole
thing because they put people into a simulator, right that looks like the inc
the inside of a Ford focus, and then they run simulations, and in
this particular study, they run simulations intended to provoke people to make anxious or
knee jerk responses. And the one part of this study that I nodded along
too, and I'm sure a lot of other people will too, is they
put people at a stop light and it's a blinking yellow light and you can
turn left, but you have to turn left against traffic, and the traffic's
coming towards you really quickly, so you're you're looking for those tiny little gaps
in the traffic. At first, there's no one behind you, So you
say, okay, I'm going to take my time, and then in the
simulator, cars pile up behind you and start to honk. And what happens
in the study is even people who are safe and careful drivers, the pressure
will eventually get to them right where they will make a move that is risky.
So I have felt this regularly. You know, I try always to
be safe, but there's being in traffic and having that pressure put on you
and not wanting to hear honking or anger or not wanting to feel that,
and you just want you want out of that situation, so you make a
move that does end up being risky, and you know it's the cause of
a lot of crashes, a lot of them. Yeah, you know,
I know that, I would say my wife and I the kids, we
are certainly on that safer side. But sometimes when there is that oncoming traffic
that you have to sort of just cut across legally of course, and everybody
else in the car is like all clear, and I don't move. I'm
still there with the blinker on, and you sort of get an just like
dude, what are you what are you waiting for? Uh? And then
there's this overwhelming sense of, oh man, another wave of cars, We're
going to be here three more minutes. And that just gets under your skin
to the sense that, okay, you want me to move, I'm gonna
I'm gonna cut somebody off and you and you, uh, you know,
you potentially put yourself at risk. So it's it's the external cars honking,
and then maybe you've got a backseat driver saying why didn't you go, and
that just sort of amps you up to hit the hit the gas and and
try to go. It's it's, it's, it's it's a it's a whole
study on human behavior, which is fascinating, it really is. And now
imagine doing it being in that situation, you know, six times on one
commute, right, the average commute now is for a lot of people is
way over half an hour and continues to to stretch upwards. And you know,
this is another thing where it's it's not quite equitable how we put people
into these certain situations. And by that I mean a lot of the pedestrian
fatalities, a lot of the pedestrians who are killed or hit by cars or
in low income communities where there's not a lot of infrastructure. There aren't sidewalks,
there aren't overpasses to get over the roads. And similarly, a lot
of the accidents, a lot of the crashes take place in rural community orror
communities where people have to drive a really long time to get their kids to
school, to get their kids, to get themselves to work. And again,
it's just a matter of the more time you spend in a car,
and the more time you're spending on the road, the more you're putting yourself
into stressful and potentially dangerous situations. And not you know, a lot of
people don't have the luxury like I do. I'm very lucky my kids can
walk to school. I don't take that for granted. It's not common in
this country. Yeah. Yeah, And you know, it's sort of a
bad, bad saying of being a road warrior. You know, you don't
you don't want to be known as the road warrior because you drive many hours
or you're sort of a professional driver if you're in sales or having to travel
for a job. But that that whole connotation of a road warrior means you're
ready to do battle with the next guy. And that's that is that is
a nutty way to be the uh the other point, and if you could
comment quickly on the number of people that don't buckle up, it's crazy.
Yeah. I mean, so there's two steps in here that I've the two
overall trends that are just very hard to wrap one's mind around. The the
one that's a little easier to wrap one's mind around is drunk driving and intoxicated
driving right which had been going down for ten years or still in a national
level, and then just through the roof right now and now some of that
is intoxicated driving and having to do with marijuana legalization around the country. Some
of it is the same COVID switch that happened. Again, it's understandable,
but it's also one of those things where you think, my god, we've
been learning about the problem with drunk drivers for decades now, and we somehow
started rolling backwards. But the one that really shocked me is seapbelt use,
the lack of restraints and a lot of fatal crashes. So when you look
at the last let's say three years of available stats for fatal crashes, a
significant amount involved unrestrained drivers and passengers, which is just it doesn't really make
sense to me, and When I spoke to researches about this, no one
could explain it either. It's not like the education is not there. We
all know we have to wear seat belts, and in fact, a lot
of cars don't let us drive without beeping loudly in our ear until we put
our restraints on. And yet people are turning off those beepers. They're they're
turning off the warnings, and they're driving around unrestrained, where they're letting their
kids drive around unrestrained or outside a car seats, and it's, you know
again, it's there's no there's no reason that this should be so in America
in twenty three, twenty four. It it just doesn't make sense, all
right, Matt, hold that line of thought for a second. Final segment
coming up, This is Your Health First. I'm doctor Joeklotti. Don't forget
visit astuctor Joglotti dot com. Stay tuned. Final segment coming up. Too
important to leave stay seated. You should have your seat belts on, by
the way. Final segment tonight on this installment of Your Health First, we're
really very lucky to have Matt's share from The New York Times with us,
and he had the front cover of last week's New York Times magazine with an
article about dangerous driving on the American roads. Why are American drivers so deadly?
Huge question? He went into great depth trying to outline that, and
it really is a pleasure having him here on your hell first with all of
you, Tonite. So much of what you wrote gets down to the behavior
people are more angry now, whether or not it's all spilling over from COVID
or were stressed down, and again sort of all the geopolitical things that we
read about every day. But so on one hand, somebody that's trying to
solve this problem, which is a behemoth problem to start off with, would
say, we have to get it at the behavioral level, which, yes,
we probably do have to address the mental health of our drivers. But
technology, do you think there is technology available on a shelf somewhere in Detroit
or Japan or wherever that we can prevent a car from starting if you're intoxicated
or you're under the influence of a drug, or if your car weaves a
certain way, sort of a steering wheel sensor that knows this is the behavior
of somebody intoxicated, the car slows down or does something or calls nine to
one one whatever. Do you think we're there and we we'll be there to
say we're going to solve this major public health problem with technology. Worry about
the behavior later. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, here's
how I would answer it. There. We know how, we know how
to solve this problem, and we could solve it in a few years if
we wanted to politically, and then this way, it is very analogous to
the gun conversation, right, we know we know how we can stop gun
depths from happening in this country. Although we may be sort of pass the
point of no return, but for a while at least we knew how we
could solve the gun crisis in this country, which is to restrict the sales
certain kinds of weapons and to move towards a model that's maybe more European,
let's say. But of course that's not politically feasible in the US. Some
people would say that's not part of American culture. And I use that analog
because it's true of cars as well. Now, the drunk drivings up,
yes, for sure, but on a on a larger level, we could
install a massive network of speed cameras, cameras, we could install speed governors
on cars, which is something that's going into action i believe next year in
some parts of Europe. That will prevent the car from going a certain speed
in a certain part of a city or on a certain road. And yeah,
of course we could. There's technology now where, at least in Georgia,
there is where judges can, for instance, insist that a convicted drunk
driver. It's like a key, a breathalyzer key that's connect to the actual
key, so that there. The technology is there and it's a matter of
deciding to use it. Another thing that just blew my mind and reporting this
is that there are all these cameras all over the United States that are on
top of red lights, and a lot of them are not allowed to be
used to monitor the behavior of drivers, and in fact, in some states
it's unconstitutional to use them at all because people had said, well, you
know, it's not fair. I don't want to be monitored that way.
How do you know it's me in the car, et cetera, et cetera.
But we know that these things work, right, We have models in
other countries where over ten years after installing, you know, you look at
the decade after the installation of a massive speed camera network, and it's like
a it's like a cliff drop off of fatalities and of speeding and aggressive driving
because people learn that they're being monitored and that they can drive that way on
that specific road. So you know it's there. It's sort of a political
will question, honestly, and I don't have super high hopes for it.
I do think what they're what the Federal Department of the Transportation is doing,
is encouraging and interesting, which is working on the roads themselves, right,
So that's adding more aroundabout adding more intersections. It's called the do road starvation
road diets where they make the roads themselves a little bit smaller and they encourage
more pedestrian bicycle use. And you know that does work. That works too.
Does it work as quickly or as well as a speed camera, No,
but it helps, it does help. Yeah. Now, I know.
We were on vacation several years ago in I think it was outside of
Phoenix, and there was maybe every eight or ten miles they would be a
mile of cameras, speed cameras, and I got nailed. I was driving
through and I said, I think we just got flashed, and sure enough
there was one hundred, one hundred and fifty dollars fine. And that was
like the first day we were there, Matt. So yeah, the family
was on me to say, Dad, slow down. But it did change
behavior when we saw that zone. Now it wasn't the entire free way,
it was just these spaced out zones that you had to go through that were
monitored. It slowed down. Now whether or not people when you hit their
pocketbook they respond will be seen, Matt in the in the final minute here,
And I really do appreciate you coming on for the average person citizen listening
tonight with the data, and certainly I'll link the article and the magazine article
for everybody, But what would you say in a minute. The take home
is so that you yourself can be less of a victim to a car crash
that may kill you or your family. The thing that I've taken away personally
from doing this research and from writing the article is that and this is not
an easy thing. I'm not pretending that this is an easy thing to do,
because we're all human beings and we all carry our own anger and stress
inside. But what I try to do now is be more cognizant about my
own feelings when I'm driving, and to always think very carefully when I am
driving. So the advice that I got from a researcher about this is you
stay in the right lane as much as you can. You play music,
soothing music as much as you can. And when you feel yourself provoked,
which you inevitably will, because we all do, you just try. You
know, you don't think I'm not going to be perfect. It's not,
you know, I'm I'm still a person, I'm still a human being.
But I'm going to try to let this one go. I'm going to try
not to let this escalate in the way that affects other people on the road
alongside me, or affect people who are in the car with me. And
again, that's not easy. That's not an easy I'm not pretending it is.
But it does work. And if everyone did that just a little bit,
we'd get in a much better place, I would agree. Matt's share
with The New York Times, thank you so much for coming on tonight.
Thank you. I really appreciate it. All right, Well that does it
for us tonight on this Sunday evening. Thank you all very much for tuning
in, taking an hour of your day out to just become a little bit
more wiser, a little bit more safer. Don't forget, we'll be back
here next Sunday evening. Take care of yourselves and the ones you love.
Eat right, exercise, get enough sleep, and don't get too crazy behind
the wheel. All right, take care. We'll see you next Sunday night.
You've been listening to Your Health First with doctor Joe Bilotti. For more
information on this program or the content of this program, go to your health
first dot com.