WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

This is On Point. I'm Megynachakrabardi.

Dr. Christopher Forrest joins us today.

He's a pediatrician and director of the Applied Clinical Research Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

This month, he published a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The report analyzed the health of America's children across 170 different kinds of health indicators.

And it compared how healthy kids were in 2007 to how healthy they were much more recently in 2023.

Forrest's research team found that across almost all of those indicators, everything from obesity, mental health, chronic diseases,

mortality, American children are less healthy now than they were back in 2007. The report calls it a,

quote, fundamental decline in the nation's health.

And Dr. Forrest joins us now. Welcome to On Point.

Thanks for having me.

I wonder if you could actually start us off with a story.

Put yourself back into the moment that you realized that this dire conclusion about the health of

American children was the only conclusion you could reach when all the data came together

in this report. I mean, where were you and sort of what was going through your mind at that

moment? I was in a little conference room next to my office, and our team was meeting weekly,

and each week we would look at a different health indicator.

And that lasted about six months as we went through a variety of health indicators.

As you point out, it was 170.

It was about halfway through that I kind of realized

everything is getting worse. Not only are kids dying at higher rates in the U.S. than the OECD,

...