Americans get more than half their calories from ultraprocessed foods, CDC report says
Nutrition research has shown for years that ultraprocessed foods make up a big chunk of the U.S. diet, especially for kids and teens.
For the first time, however, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed those high levels of consumption, using dietary data collected from August 2021 to August 2023.
The report comes amid growing scrutiny of such foods by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who blames them for causing chronic disease.
'We are poisoning ourselves and it's coming principally from these ultraprocessed foods,' Kennedy told Fox News earlier this year.
Overall, about 55% of total calories consumed by Americans age 1 and older came from ultraprocessed foods during that period, according to the report. For adults, ultraprocessed foods made up about 53% of total calories consumed, but for kids through age 18, it was nearly 62%.
The top sources included burgers and sandwiches, sweet baked goods, savory snacks, pizza and sweetened drinks.
Young children consumed fewer calories from ultraprocessed foods than older kids, the report found. Adults 60 and older consumed fewer calories from those sources than younger adults. Low-income adults consumed more ultraprocessed foods than those with higher incomes.
The results were not surprising, said co-author Anne Williams, a CDC nutrition expert.
What was surprising was that consumption of ultraprocessed foods appeared to dip slightly over the past decade. Among adults, total calories from those sources fell from about 56% in 2013-2014 and from nearly 66% for kids in 2017-2018.
Williams said she couldn't speculate about the reason for the decline or whether consumption of less processed foods increased.
But Andrea Deierlein, a nutrition expert at New York University who was not involved in the research, suggested that there may be greater awareness of the potential harms of ultraprocessed foods.
'People are trying, at least in some populations, to decrease their intakes of these foods,' she said.
Concern over ultraprocessed foods' health effects has been growing for years, but finding solutions has been difficult. Many studies have linked them to obesity, diabetes and heart disease, but they haven't been able to prove that the foods directly cause those chronic health problems.
One small but influential study found that even when diets were matched for calories, sugar, fat, fiber and micronutrients, people consumed more calories and gained more weight when they ate ultraprocessed foods than when they ate minimally processed foods.
Research published this week in the journal Nature found that participants in a clinical trial lost twice as much weight when they ate minimally processed foods — such as pasta, chicken, fruits and vegetables — than ultraprocessed foods, even those matched for nutrition components and considered healthy, such as ready-to-heat frozen meals, protein bars and shakes.
Part of the problem is simply defining ultraprocessed foods.
The new CDC report used the most common definition based on the four-tier Nova system developed by Brazilian researchers that classifies foods according to the amount of processing they undergo. Such foods tend to be 'hyperpalatable, energy-dense, low in dietary fiber and contain little or no whole foods, while having high amounts of salt, sweeteners and unhealthy fats,' the CDC report said.
U.S. health officials recently said there are concerns over whether current definitions 'accurately capture' the range of foods that may affect health. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department recently issued a request for information to develop a new, uniform definition of ultraprocessed foods for products in the U.S. food supply.
In the meantime, Americans should try to reduce ultraprocessed foods in their daily diets, Deierlein said. For instance, instead of instant oatmeal that may contain added sugar, sodium, artificial colors and preservatives, use plain oats sweetened with honey or maple syrup. Read food packages and nutrition information, she suggested.
'I do think that there are less-processed options available for many foods,' she said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
National Geographic
20 minutes ago
- National Geographic
How cutting out certain foods can trigger new allergies
Bagels, which often include gluten, are one of many foods often excluded in elimination diets. But for allergy-prone individuals, cutting out foods for too long may disrupt immune tolerance and trigger dangerous reactions. Photograph by Rebecca Hale, National Geographic Elimination diets are everywhere—from parents managing eczema to influencers cutting out gluten and dairy in pursuit of 'clean eating.' But research shows that removing foods from your diet can subtly change how your immune system reacts when you eat them again. In some people, especially those with conditions like eczema or past food allergies, that loss of tolerance can spark dangerous reactions—even life-threatening anaphylaxis—when the food returns. This risk is often overlooked in the growing popularity of elimination diets. According to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, Americans are cutting more from their plates than ever. Some do it to manage celiac disease or irritable bowel syndrome, others to reduce bloating, fatigue, or joint pain. Social media trends like #cleaneating have only amplified the appeal. By 2024, more than half of Americans reported following a specific diet or eating pattern, compared to just 38 percent in 2019. Yet for the immune system, regular exposure to food proteins helps maintain a state of tolerance—one that can be disrupted when those foods disappear from the menu for too long. Understanding how and why that shift happens is key to knowing when elimination diets help, and when they might put you at risk. The science of oral tolerance and food allergies 'The intestine has an unenviable task,' says Brian Vickery, chief of allergy and immunology and director of the food allergy program at Emory's Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. 'It has to identify and respond to a constant barrage of environmental stimuli that can be both dangerous and beneficial.' (Is gluten really that bad for you? Here's what happens when you stop eating it.) The gastrointestinal tract, which has more immune lymphocytes than any other body part, encounters trillions of microbes and more than 30 kilograms of food proteins each year. Yet, it manages to defend against harmful invaders while ignoring harmless foods and friendly bacteria. This balancing act relies on oral tolerance, a process in which immune responses to ingested food proteins are actively suppressed, which in turn prevents harmful reactions like food allergies. While the underlying immune mechanisms are not entirely understood, the latest studies indicate it begins with specialized antigen-presenting cells that capture food antigens in the gut and instruct nearby T cells to stand down. This signal gives rise to antigen-specific regulatory T cells, which calm the immune response to food proteins. (As food allergies rise, new treatments are on the horizon.) 'The gut is important in the initial establishment of tolerance,' says Michael Pistiner, director of Food Allergy Advocacy, Education and Prevention, Food Allergy Center at the MassGeneral Hospital for Children. 'If you're not already allergic, early introduction to foods can help promote tolerance and protect infants from developing a food allergy.' That protection doesn't end in childhood. Regular, ongoing exposure to foods helps maintain oral tolerance throughout life. Recent research in food allergy patients treated with oral immunotherapy, where gradually increasing doses of the culprit food are given orally, highlights how continued ingestion is often needed to maintain a desensitized state. Conversely, there's evidence that elimination diets for some can disrupt oral tolerance and encourage the immune system to develop allergies. When elimination diets increase allergy risk For parents of children with eczema, it's common to suspect certain foods are worsening flare-ups. Many turn to elimination diets in hopes of finding the culprit. But research has uncovered a hidden risk. Anne Marie Singh, professor and chief of Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Rheumatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her colleagues evaluated almost 300 children with eczema on elimination diets. (How a tick bite can cause food allergies in humans.) 'We found that if you removed the food from their diet, upon reintroduction there was a significant increase in the risk of allergic reactions, including potentially severe immediate allergic reactions,' says Singh. The results were striking: almost one in five children (19 percent) developed new immediate allergic reactions when the eliminated foods were reintroduced, even though they had no previous history of such responses. Most were mild, but alarmingly, 30 percent of reactions were severe, classified as anaphylaxis. The danger isn't limited to children. In a separate study of 30 adults who developed allergies to foods they had previously tolerated, 70 percent had been on elimination diets beforehand. Half experienced anaphylaxis, and the vast majority (80 percent) had pre-existing allergic conditions such as environmental allergies, asthma, or eczema. For people without a history of allergies, the risk appears much lower. If you're thinking about trying an elimination diet, experts say the safest approach depends on your risk level. If you're at higher risk (children or anyone with pre-existing allergy conditions), consult with a healthcare professional before starting an elimination diet. 'The more allergic you are, an elimination diet could potentially be a problem,' says Singh. Pistiner adds that 'in infants with eczema, elimination diets can be detrimental, especially at this very important time of early introduction.' Experts also recommend that children following elimination diets have close medical supervision to ensure nutritional adequacy and healthy growth. (What scientists are learning about how to prevent allergies in kids.) Duration matters, too. A shorter elimination phase gives less time for oral tolerance to break down. Singh notes that 'two to four weeks of elimination should be enough time to know if it makes a difference and also short enough to not risk an allergic reaction when you try it again.' In some cases, completely cutting out a food isn't necessary. If symptoms are mild, keeping small, tolerable amounts in the diet may help maintain oral tolerance while still easing discomfort, adds Singh.
Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
Arbitration agreements shield assisted living homes from accountability, some experts say
Advertisement E.J. Lococo, a retired federal agent, said he thought it meant arbitration would apply if 'someone stole my mother's Depends or CD player. . . . I didn't know [that] if you were going to kill my mother, we were going to go to arbitration.' Yet, Lococo alleges, that is exactly what happened. His mother, 80, died in August 2021 from pressure ulcers that her family alleges went untreated for months while she was at the Atrium. Her son filed a wrongful death suit against Benchmark Senior Living LLC, which operates Atrium, on behalf of her estate last year. But in March, a judge granted the facility's motion to dismiss all claims against it, ruling the estate was legally required to resolve them through binding arbitration. Advertisement Facing steep filing fees and the costs of paying an arbitrator, Lococo's lawyer, Michael Grace, said he decided not to pursue arbitration against Benchmark. He is, however, going forward with claims against two outside companies that provided medical care to Judith Lococo while she lived at the Atrium, and were not included in the arbitration agreement. The case underscores the impact of arbitration agreements, which are legal and common in the assisted living industry, but severely restrict residents from holding facilities accountable when something goes wrong, according to elder care lawyers and advocates. 'Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than win in forced arbitration,' according to a 2019 report by the American Association for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization for trial lawyers. Moreover, critics say, residents of assisted living facilities and their family members don't realize the implications of what they're signing. They also don't have to put themselves in that situation: they are not required to sign arbitration agreements as a condition of admission, these critics said, and should not do so. Unlike court proceedings, an arbitrator is privately paid, usually with both sides sharing the expense, which can cost plaintiffs thousands of dollars. Court rules don't apply, meaning plaintiffs may not call as many witnesses or obtain as much evidence as they believe they need to support their case. The arbitrator, usually just one person, is supposed to be neutral. But critics say the facilities too often have a preexisting relationship with an arbitrator who is likely to favor their side. And when arbitrators do rule in favor of plaintiffs, judgments tend to be much lower than those awarded by juries. Advertisement In Lococo's case, the arbitration agreement even included a clause that would require the family to pay Benchmark's legal fees if it filed a lawsuit. Benchmark declined to comment on Lococo's allegations, but said in a statement released by its lawyer that it 'places its highest priority on the care, safety and well-being of our residents.' The lawyer, Joseph M. Desmond, said in an email, 'We stand firmly behind the quality of care we provide and our attentive staff, whose skills consistently receive high marks for resident satisfaction.' He added that Benchmark's policy is 'to offer a voluntary arbitration agreement to individuals moving into our communities' and that arbitration 'is entirely optional and not a requirement for residency.' The Massachusetts Assisted Living Association, which advocates for the assisted living industry in the state, said arbitration has the advantage of resolving disputes more quickly and at a lower cost than through litigation. Arbitration agreements can be negotiated and amended before a resident moves into a home, a spokesperson said. 'Residents and families sometimes select an option for arbitration when they move in so that if they have concerns they can resolve them in a way that is both timely and less costly than litigation,' said Brian Doherty, the group's president. The devastating blaze that killed 10 residents of an assisted living facility in Fall River in July drew attention to the lack of transparency in the industry, which in Massachusetts is more loosely regulated than nursing homes. And, critics say, arbitration agreements contribute to that lack of transparency because the proceedings are not public and settlements are confidential. Those conditions can obscure from public view problems and dysfunction at a facility, details that would come to light in court proceedings. Advertisement Arbitration agreements, so far, at least, appear not to be a factor in the Fall River case. 'It has not come up in our case at this point,' said Robin Gouveia, who filed the first lawsuit on behalf of a Gabriel House resident. Arbitration agreements also include a clause requiring that residents agree not to sue the home or seek other court remedies. 'There's a constitutional right to have a jury and an arbitration clause takes it away with the swipe of a pen,' said David J. Hoey, an attorney who has represented families alleging abuse and neglect at nursing homes and assisted living centers for more than 30 years. 'I've arbitrated enough cases to know that they're unfair to the injured party.' In 2019, he filed a wrongful death suit on behalf of the estate of a client who was allegedly shoved to the ground by another resident at an assisted living home in Danvers, broke his hip, and later died of complications from the injury. A judge dismissed the suit against the operators, citing an arbitration agreement. The arbitrator ruled in favor of Hoey's client. But he said the judgment of $360,000, was much less than Hoey believed a jury would have awarded. The state attorney general's office is drafting new consumer protections for the assisted living industry, but a spokesperson would not say whether changes to arbitration clauses are under consideration. As attorney general in 2017, now-Governor Maura Healey signed on to a letter with counterparts from 16 states that criticized arbitration agreements and opposed a federal proposal to lift a ban on their use in nursing homes. Advertisement The federal government lifted its ban on arbitration clauses in nursing homes following a legal challenge. Instead, in 2019 it adopted new requirements, prohibiting nursing homes from denying admission to anyone who refused to agree to arbitration and allowing residents or their representatives 30 days to change their mind if they do sign one. Assisted living facilities, which are not regulated by the federal government, are not bound by the same arbitration requirements as nursing homes, but generally have adopted the same standards, according to Hoey. A Massachusetts commission formed this year to consider new regulations for the industry recommended a ban on them as a condition of admission in a draft proposal. Other states differ on how they regulate such clauses. Hoey said the agreements aren't foolproof and can be challenged in court on various grounds, including if they were signed by a person who didn't have legal authority to represent a resident or was under duress. Lococo's son said he tapped into his retirement savings to pay for his mother's care, including more than $13,000 a month to the Atrium at Cardinal Drive. Several months after she moved, COVID-19 swept the country, and the facility was placed in lockdown. Lococo said there were staffing shortages and he feared his mother wasn't getting the care they were paying for, which included assistance with bathing, toiletry, and medical treatment. She fell several times in late 2020, and developed bed sores, according to the lawsuit. Advertisement But, Lococo said, nobody at the facility ever told him his mother had developed a pressure ulcer around May 2021 that had allegedly gone untreated. He said he learned of it when the family moved her to another facility three months later and a nurse sent him graphic photos of her wound, showing exposed bone. 'I was enraged,' Lococo said. His mother died days later. 'These places that call themselves assisted living fly under the radar. . . How is this not regulated?' Lococo's attorney, Michael Grace, said family members generally don't think about something bad happening to their relatives after spending so much time and emotional energy finding an assisted living home for them. They waive their right to sue, he said, because they're thinking 'it looks like a good place and nothing is going to go wrong.' Shelley Murphy can be reached at
Vox
an hour ago
- Vox
How 'the Grim Reaper effect' stops our government from saving lives
is a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox's Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy. Last summer, the Congressional Budget Office released a report under the unassuming name 'Budgetary Effects of Policies That Would Increase Hepatitis C Treatment.' I read it because I am the type of person who is interested in the budgetary effects of policies that would increase hepatitis C treatment. Embedded in the report, though, was a point that will be important for just about anything the federal government tries to do to save the lives of Americans. Hep C is a nasty viral infection whose effects are, for a virus, unusually long-lasting. Untreated, it causes serious liver damage over the course of decades, leading to much higher rates of cirrhosis and liver cancer, all of which is very expensive to treat. But in the 2010s, a number of extremely effective antivirals, which randomized trials show cure upwards of 95 percent of chronic infections, came on the market. Like most new drugs, these antivirals are under patent and quite expensive; as of 2020, the cost of an eight-to-twelve week course of the drugs, usually enough to cure an infection, was between $11,500 and $17,000. Yet CBO concludes that the drugs are so effective, and the costs of treating patients with hep C who haven't been cured are so massive, that expanding treatment with these drugs reduces federal spending on hep C treatment and associated complications overall. Doubling the number of Medicaid patients getting the drugs would increase federal spending by $4 billion over 10 years. But over the same decade, the federal government would save $7 billion through reduced need for treatments like liver transplants and ongoing care for chronic cases. Put like that, this starts to sound like one of the rarest discoveries in federal budgeting: a free lunch. That means a policy that is good on its own merits (saving lives and preventing debilitating chronic disease) but also saves the government money. But the most interesting part of the report to me comes at the end. 'An increase in hepatitis C treatment could also affect the federal budget in other ways—for example, by leading to improved longevity and lower rates of disability,' the authors note. The latter point is pretty straightforward: If hepatitis C leads to disabilities that make people eligible for disability insurance and subsidized health coverage, then reduced hep C means lower spending on those programs. But (and this is me speculating, so blame me and not the CBO if I'm wrong) that effect is probably swamped by that of 'improved longevity.' Simply put: curing hep C means people live longer, which means they spend more years collecting Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits. That could mean that whatever cost savings the actual hep C treatment produces might be wiped out by the fact that the people whose lives are being saved will be cashing retirement checks for longer. I like to call it the Grim Reaper effect. The US runs a large budget deficit. It also provides far more generous benefits to seniors than to children or working-age adults. Per the Urban Institute's regular report on government spending for children, the ratio of per capita spending on senior citizens to per capita spending on children is over 5 to 1. Put together, the deficit and the elder-biased composition of federal spending implies something that is equally important and macabre: helping people live longer lives will, all else being equal, be bad for the federal budget. In an increasingly aging country, hep C is not the first place where the Grim Reaper effect has been felt, and it won't be the last. I don't have an easy fix for the situation, but it feels important to at least understand. Logan's Run economics One of the first and clearest cases of this longevity dilemma in budgeting came with cigarettes. The history of mass cigarette smoking in the US is surprisingly short. Per the CDC, American adults were only smoking 54 cigarettes annually per capita as of 1900. By 1963, that number had grown to 4,345. The development of automatic rolling machines, milder forms of tobacco, and mass marketing meant millions of working and middle-class Americans became pack-a-day smokers. But while the per capita average floated around 4,000 from the late '40s to the early '70s, it then began a precipitous decline. In 2022, the most recent year for which the Federal Trade Commission released data, Americans bought 173.5 billion cigarettes, or 667 per adult, less than a sixth of the peak, while fewer than 12 percent of American adults now smoke. Cigarettes are, of course, deadly, but they kill with a lag, usually after decades of regular smoking. That meant that in the late 1980s and 1990s, the US started to hit peak cigarette deaths, as adults who came of age during the smoking era started to get lung cancer and emphysema en masse, at numbers that less-addicted subsequent generations wouldn't match. The male death rate from lung cancer peaked in 1990, and the female death rate peaked in 1998. A flurry of economic research at the time tried to make sense of what this meant for the federal budget. Smoking harms your health. But it also shortens your lifespan. A useful 1998 Congressional Budget Office report noted that most research found that, over their lives, smokers spend more in health care costs (including more that goes on the federal tab) than non-smokers, even accounting for their shorter lifespans. But that picture changed once you added in pensions and other non-health spending. Economists John Shoven, Jeffrey Sundberg, and John Bunker in 1989 estimated that the average male smoker saved Social Security $20,000 (about $60,000 today) in benefits not paid. The figure for women, who live longer than men on average but earn less in wages and thus in Social Security, was about half that. 'It seems likely that the Federal budget currently benefits from smoking,' two Congressional Research Service researchers concluded in 1994, when the 'benefits' of early death to Social Security and Medicare were included. Malcolm Gladwell, in a thoughtful 1990 treatment of the problem in the Washington Post, was catchier: 'Not Smoking Could be Hazardous to Pension System.' Decades later, the CBO did a fuller analysis of the budgetary consequences of smoking in the aftermath of the large cigarette tax increase President Obama signed in early 2009 and proposals for further hikes. At first blush, the revenue raised from a cigarette tax should be easy to estimate: multiply annual cigarette sales by the amount of the tax. But obviously raising the price of the good will reduce the amount people buy; one major reason for cigarette taxes, after all, is to deter smoking. The CBO used a price elasticity of -0.3, meaning that a 10 percent increase in cigarette prices reduces the number sold by 3 percent. But the 2012 report was meant to go a step or two further, according to then-director Doug Elmendorf, who explained the backstory in a recent conversation with me. 'The effects of making people healthier are good for those people, obviously, but also perhaps good for the federal budget because the federal government pays for a lot of health care. If you're healthier, you don't need so much health care.' But at the same time, 'It was clear that if people were healthier, they would live longer, and that could have budgetary costs. It wasn't obvious offhand what the balance of those effects would be.' The 2012 CBO report tried to put all these effects together: the effect of lower smoking on reducing health-care spending (including government-funded spending) due to a healthier population, the effect on Social Security and other benefit spending from resulting longer lifespans, the effect of lower smoking rates on wages, and tax revenue from those wages. (The latter is often not included in formal CBO scores, as it tips closer to 'dynamic' scoring where the effect of legislation on the overall economy is included.) Over the first 10 years after a hike in the cigarette tax, they found that having a healthier population was more of a blessing than a curse, budget-wise. The health effects of a cigarette tax hike reduced federal health spending by over $900 million over a decade, even after accounting for people living longer and claiming more years of Medicare. By contrast, retirement programs only spent $183 million more because people lived longer. Swamping all that was a $2.9 billion increase in tax revenue from a healthier population capable of working and earning more. But that's just the 10-year effect. As the decades pass, the effect of longevity would grow and grow. First, Medicare costs would start to rise, as the cost of a longer-lived population began to swamp the cost savings of that population being healthier overall. (Even people who've been healthy for a long time can run up major health spending at the end of their now longer lives.) Social Security costs would keep rising, too. Fifty years in, these costs would overwhelm the benefits, and the cigarette tax's health effects would start costing the budget, on average. The point isn't 'cigarette taxes are good' or 'cigarette taxes are bad.' The point is that even a policy that saves lives isn't necessarily a slam dunk from the hard-eyed perspective of budget policy. Recent years provided a possibly even darker example. In 2022, the Medicare Trustees pushed back the date they expected the program's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund to be depleted by two years. They had several reasons, but a major one was that Covid-19 had killed hundreds of thousands of Medicare patients prematurely. Not only that, but 'Medicare beneficiaries whose deaths were identified as related to COVID had costs that were much higher than the average Medicare beneficiary prior to the onset of the pandemic.' Put another way: Covid killed off Medicare's sickest, and most expensive, enrollees. That meant the program was left with an overall healthier population, which by itself lowered medical costs by 2.9 percent in 2021. Similarly, a paper by a team of health economists earlier this year estimated that the 1.4 million excess deaths in the US due to Covid had the net effect of boosting the Social Security trust fund to the tune of $156 billion. That represented $219 billion in benefits that no longer needed to be sent, minus $44 billion in lower payroll tax revenues and $25 billion in new benefits to surviving family members. It all reminds one of Logan's Run, in which people are killed off upon hitting age 30 lest they take up too many of society's resources. That movie is a dystopia — but as a budget proposal, it'd score very well. It's good to save lives, actually The economists and agencies doing this math are, of course, only doing their jobs. We need to know what government programs will cost over the near- and long-run. These effects on health and life and death matter to those calculations. 'Members of Congress regularly thought that we were ghoulish for talking about how, if people live longer, there'll be higher benefits for Social Security,' Elmendorf recalls. 'But it's not ghoulish. Obviously, we want to live longer and members of Congress should try to help all Americans live longer. CBO's job — an analyst's job in general — is just to be honest about the likely effects.' But the fact that increased human longevity on its own worsens the budget picture should lead to some reflection. For one thing, it suggests that sometimes we should embrace policies simply because they're the right thing to do, even if they don't pay for themselves. Recall the hepatitis C treatments that prevent expensive long-term expenses for Medicaid, but might add on new costs by extending the benefits' lifespans. It's possible that, upon taking the latter into account, expanding access to hep C drugs costs the government money on net. It's a free lunch no longer. That's not a reason not to embrace the policy, though. Lots of things the government does cost money. The military doesn't pay for itself. K–12 schools don't pay for themselves. Smithsonian Museums don't pay for themselves. That doesn't mean those aren't important functions that it makes sense to put some of our tax dollars toward. Hep C treatment, I think, fits in that list, even if it's not literally free from a budget standpoint. Congress should also allow agencies like the CBO to do more to symmetrically account for the positive budgetary effects of longevity, along with the negatives. People who live longer, after all, often earn wages in those new years of life, wages that generate income and payroll tax revenues for the federal government. Moreover, people at the end of their careers are earning more money and hence paying more taxes than young people, meaning life extension helping people in their 50s and 60s might be especially good for tax revenue. The problem is that the CBO generally considers 'how many workers paying taxes are there' to be an economic effect and only considers it in special 'dynamic' scores of legislation, in which the economic consequences of them are taken into account. Dynamic scoring has been a topic of great controversy for decades, going back at least to the Bush II administration, but the rule Congress sets for CBO on when to use dynamic scoring results in CBO applying dynamic scoring very rarely in practice. A middle ground option, though, would be something called 'population change' scoring, in which CBO considers the direct effects of a change in the population (through longer lifespans, say, or immigration) on the level of employment and tax revenue, without doing a full, more complicated dynamic score. That would make its accounting of the effects of longer lives less biased: the budgetary benefits would be counted alongside the costs. We should also consider the aspects of our budget situation that make the longevity effect a reality. One is the US's long-standing, bipartisan choice to run massive budget deficits, even during relative boom times. One arithmetic consequence of that choice is that it makes the continued existence of every American a net loss for the country's books. That's not the main reason to avoid large deficits during booms, but it's a somewhat toxic byproduct all the same. The other aspect driving this effect is the choice to invest government resources very heavily in seniors relative to other age groups. This is due in large measure to the US choice to provide universal health care for seniors but not other age groups, and due to our lack of investment in very young children and working-age adults compared to other rich nations. There is no law of nature saying the US has to weigh its priorities that way. As long as we do, the numbers will imply that it's better for the budget for people to die before they get old.
