5

More People Are Overweight And Undernourished (At The Same Time)

It's time to do away with the medieval stereotype that the world is divided into poor countries suffering from famine and port-swilling, cheese-guzzling rich countries suffering from obesity. This is the 21st century, a time of progress and opportunity. Today anyone can be obese or undernourished -- or, amazingly, both at once.

Since fatty foods are now a frugal form of feeding a family, many third-world citizens are joining the first world in the crippling obesity epidemic. Ironically, this new health scare isn't scaring away their old famine problem. While obesity in many poor countries has doubled since the '80s, that has had no impact on the number of people suffering food scarcity, which had risen by 5% by 2016.

This is called the "double burden" of malnutrition, and now 9 out of 10 countries are suffering from both an obesity and malnutrition problem in the same communities. WHO-backed studies have found that 1 in 3 impoverished children won't be just under or overweight, but fluctuate drastically between an empty plate and empty calories, skipping the healthy middle ground and suffering from the unhealthy aftermath of being both famished and full-figured.

4

East Asian People Are Forgetting How To Write

East Asian scripts like Hanzi and Kanji (Chinese and Japanese, respectively) each have tens of thousands of unique and complex characters. It's a daunting challenge to recall, since a lot of them look like the puzzle maze on a particularly cruel Denny's place mat.

Wikimedia CommonsIs it a boat? A dragon eating a knight? Are we even playing Pictionary right now?

But how do all those symbols fit onto a keyboard? Obvious answer: They don't. Almost all speakers of these languages input words through a predictive version of pinyin, a Romanized version of the language that allows them to type by sound and let software transmogrify it into the specific character they need. As a result, millions of people in China and Japan are experiencing a phenomenon known as "character amnesia," whereby speakers can understand the written language just fine, but can't for the life of them figure out how to assemble the characters themselves. Like the IKEA instructions of languages.

3

Dealing With Sleep Deprivation Often Worsens "Dream Deprivation"

It's no secret that our ubiquitous blue screens are ruining our sleep, which the medical world defines (in a very judgmental tone) as "voluntary chronic pattern of shortened sleep." So an entire industry has popped up trying to help people get longer and deeper sleep, emphasis on the deep. Deep sleep, aka restorative sleep, is what heals the body, making you wake up all energetic and fit and not in need of a coffee enema.

Titov Dmitriy/ShutterstockWe give it three years before that line goes from joke to real Starbucks menu item.

2

Doctors Are Over-Prescribing Meds To Get Better Reviews

On the internet, everyone can be a critic. A petty, anonymous critic who can sink a restaurant's rating because they had to wait five minutes too long for a glass of water. So it was only a matter of time before picky patrons started rating their doctors as mercilessly as their Lyft drivers. Which is problematic, since most folks are in a more generous mood when they get what they want (pills), instead of what they need (a stern talking to about their lifestyles).

1

Modern Medicine Is Keeping People Alive For Too Long

By most metrics, being alive is better than being dead. But thanks to medical advances, the process of dying can be stretched out for years, and that time is spent mostly in hospitals hooked to machines instead of outside smelling roses. In America, 25% of Medicare's half-a-trillion-dollar budget now goes to taking care of people's final year on Earth, with 40% of that pumped into the last month, as doctors, nurses, and the occasional sorcerer try to keep you out of their yearly mortality rate report. And what that money buys is nothing but misery. That's because, like Rob Schneider's career, dying is becoming more painful, depressing, and confusing with every decade.

Singer, Meeker, Et. Al./Annals of Internal MedicineWe experienced all three just looking at this.