Two additional factors:

- Much higher stress from making ends meet, world events, national decline, etc.

- Supply chain issues leading to lower quality chemical byproducts in your food and household items. Though we don’t know how much of a problem this is and we may not for a long time, if ever.

Good points.

I wonder about your sedentary comment. You said during the pandemic, when we were encouraged to stay home, but what about after? At first it feels true because a lot of people WFH now. But before Covid, most people drove to work, which isn't really any better than WFH and it's arguably worse due to the stress of driving.

Covid also strongly encouraged outdoor activities over indoor ones. In my area, many indoor events were converted to outdoor events and we found that even with the relaxation of precautions, people prefer we keep them outdoors as it was more enjoyable.

I suppose my experience doesn't match up with people who live in more disagreeable climates, like the South or Southwest.

Yeah it’s a complex shift but all the indicators I’ve seen at a population level show upticks in markers associated with increased sedentary behaviors.

Some people definitely went the other way and took up more healthful activities but the dominant shift seems to have been toward less physical activity.

I personally wonder if the “long covid cognitive effects” aren’t down to things like less exercise, more social isolation and too much screen time, especially as people keep looking for explanations for effects on children.

It’s not like it all went away when the pandemic officially ended either. People can be slow to change.

I remember reading years ago that the average American adult puts on 3 lbs during the holiday season and then never recovers by dropping that excess weight, so it just accumulates every year. For the people whose fitness routines and health were negatively impacted by COVID (e.g. people who had young children at home, in my experience, and people who got really sick), I think we might be seeing a similar effect. You can't get back lost time even after life "returns to normal."

It's easy to go from non-sedentary to sedentary. It's harder to go back. So some didn't go back - they remained sedentary after Covid concern faded.

I don't know what fraction of the population went sedentary, and what fraction of those remained sedentary. It could be enough to matter statistically.

As far as I know, while a sedentary lifestyle leads to or exacerbates the physical deterioration which leads to death by heart disease, I do not think slowing down brings it on, at least within a couple of years. For people at high risk, unaccustomed exercise is recognized as a trigger of acute disease (with snow-shoveling being a well-known example.)