Introduction

We always hear about the United States as it relates to high obesity rates and high healthcare costs. Unsurprisingly these issues compound on one another which has led to skyrocketing national debt in the form of programs like medicare/ medicaid. The biggest single factor responsible for preventing obesity and good promoting good health was exercise. I was curious what percentages of Americans actually meet the national health standards by the CDC.

As a result here is some data about Americans as it pertains to exercise and living a healthier life.

We are going to cover these topics in the next several slides.

• What are the guidelines to be considered “physically active”
• How many Americans actually meet the set exercise requirements.
  
• Statistics and graphs as it relates to gender, age, type of exercise
• All data was obtained from CDC / National Center for Health Statistics

I am also going to make it very simple with an index here. Slide 1 - Title, Slide 2 - Introduction, Slide 3 - Math with Latex 1, Slide 4 - Math with Latex 2, Slide 5 - ggplot 1, Slide 6 - Code that created ggplot 1, Slide 7 - ggplot 2, Slide 8 - plotly plot 3d, Slide 9 - final thoughts/analysis

Math text with latex slide Number1

In order to generate graphs about the data we must first define our definitions.Here are some formulas I created using Latex based on the requirements.

Physical Activity Guidelines are set by the CDC, an adult is considered physically active if they meet:

\[ \textbf{Aerobic Activity: } 150 \text{ minutes of moderate activity a week} \]

\[ \textbf{Muscle Strengthening: } \geq 2 \text{ days a week} \]

Only adults who meet both guidelines are counted as fully active.

As a note - these will be the values I use going forward with my data to evaluate percentages of people considered fully active.

(Personal thoughts) But lets be honest even doing one of these a week is better than most. While personally I would still count it as healthy, for this we will go by the set CDC guidelines.

Math text with latex slide Number2

Here are the definitions and variables we will use to create the plots

National Statistics from the 2023 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS):

Let
\[ A = \textbf{% meeting aerobic guideline},\quad S = \textbf{% meeting strength guideline} \]

Then the percentage of Americans that meet neither requirement is:

\[ N = 100 - (A + S - B) \]

Where:
- \(B = \textbf{% meeting both strength and aerobic guidlines}\)

Here are the values provided by the data on what percentage of Americans meet what:

• \(A = 46.9\%\)
  
• \(S = 31.0\%\)
  
• \(B = 24.2\%\)

ggplot(ageandgender, aes(x = ageandgroup, y = percentmeetingboth, fill = gender)) +
geom_bar(stat = "identity", position = "dodge") +
labs(
title = "Adults Meeting BOTH Guidelines by Age and Gender (2023)",
x = "Age Group",
y = "Percent Meeting Both",
fill = "Gender"
) +
theme_minimal(base_size = 14)

#here is the code which printed the previous chart :)

Final Thoughts

(The Bargraph of Gender/Age vs Meeting Both Requirements)

Its pretty obvious the amount of people who exercise would slow with age but I have to admit I’m surprised the percents are even that high. You always hear about the obesity crisis in America and how it is a big reason healthcare is so expensive pertaining to medicaid and medicare costs. I just figured it would have been lower, granted yes 40% for younger people and 15% for older people isn’t amazing by any means haha.

(The Piechart of both genders Physical Activity by Category)

This one really surprised me when looking at the data. It makes sense that almost half of Americans do not meet either of the 2 exercise requirements set by the CDC. However I was very surprised that almost a 1/4 of the population actually meet both guidelines. Again 25% is not amazing but it is much higher than I would have initially thought.

(The 3d Model Combining each of the Previous Categories)

This is really fun to look at since you can actually click and drag to move it around. It combines all the data talked about gender/age/percent meeting both. It is a bit hard to make sense of the data when first looking at it so while it is fun it probably wouldn’t make the best tool for communicating data and statistics to someone. Atleast not the data I am working with maybe something more complex would better suit it.