It is a core belief of ours at Building H that major new technologies, over time, shape social norms and rewire our day-to-day behaviors, with often dramatic consequences to our health. So it’s no surprise that we followed with interest Apple’s unveiling this week of the Vision Pro, its new device/computing platform. How important is this?

The American Beverage Association - a lobby group supported by soft-drink manufacturers including Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Monster, and most every other non-alcoholic beverage company you can think of - does not like soda taxes.

And if you happen to be googling to see if soda taxes work, they’re happy to suggest that they do not, with advertisements pushing links to stories that purport to prove that soda taxes don’t work.

Last September, the Food and Drug Administration, eying those high-sugar, low-fat snacks and cereals labeled “healthy” in big green type, proposed a new standard for using the word. Too much sugar or salt, and manufacturers would have to remove the word “healthy” from their labels, or reformulate their products to meet the new standards.

We start this edition with some news about Building H. First, we are delighted to announce that we are being joined by a fantastic team of advisors, who will be supporting us with strategic advice as we grow our network, develop a set of key projects like the Building H Index, and take steps to become a sustainable organization. Our advisors are…

Back in the early days of the pandemic, Brittany Sigler connected with us on Twitter and became a key contributor to our first Building H Index report. She then took the question that motivates us – what would it take to make companies offer healthier products – and pursued it as the basis of her doctoral dissertation, with our longtime collaborator Sara Singer as one of her advisors.

Back in May we covered the buzz about a new class of weight loss drugs that were showing great promise in clinical trials. Fast forward seven months and there’s a new buzz: demand for the diabetes drug Ozempic and the weight loss drug Wegovy (which is based on a higher dose of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic) is through the roof – leading to shortages.

Perhaps the central challenge of public health, and in turn of this Building H project, is to improve the public understanding of how everyday behaviors - our habits, routines, customs, beliefs - manifest into unintended outcomes, those so-called diseases of civilization: obesity, cancer, lung disease, heart disease, depression, diabetes and so on.

Two articles in this edition speak to the complex interplay among our environments, our lifestyles, our bodies, our minds, and our underlying biology. The Economist takes a hard look at antidepressants, raising a number of concerns about their widespread use, the hit-or-miss nature of their effectiveness, the increasing skepticism about the underlying science, the difficulty of weaning off of them, and the increasing hazards they pose for older users.

Our biggest project at Building H is the Building H index. Last April, our index ranked and rated products and services from 37 companies on how they affect the health of their customers. The report got great national coverage, with Fast Company covering the release and the issue of how the product environment affects public health. We were also pleased that many of the companies we profiled engaged in the process as well.

And now: time for the next edition of the Index!

This edition of the newsletter is like a reverse mullet: a party up front, and all business in the back.

First, the party!

We’re thrilled to announce two in-person Building H meet-ups next month in New York and Boston to get input, ideas, and share progress on our Healthy Design Principles.

Please join us! You can sign up on Eventbrite for Wednesday November 2 in Brooklyn or Wednesday November 9 in Boston.

In an article for Slate, Building H co-founder Steve Downs looks at the enduring influence of The Jetsons, a cartoon sitcom launched in 1962. The Jetsons gave us a vision of technology could shape our world — it gave us flying cars, moving sidewalks, robot maids, and even nuclear-powered dogs. Implicit in this vision was that technology would utter in a lifestyle of exceptional convenience — everything could be summoned or performed with the touch of a button or a simple voice command.

Embedded cultural assumptions about how technology will shape our lives has had profound consequences for our health. Steve makes this argument in an article posted this morning in Slate: The Jetsons, Now 60 Years Old, Is Iconic. That’s a Problem. He uses the 60th anniversary of the cartoon sitcom to reflect on the world its creators envisioned, the enduring influence that vision has had, the lifestyles that resulted, and the need for new visions in which technology supports the everyday behaviors that humans need to thrive.

Life expectancy in the US is down again, according to a new report released by the National Center for Health Statistics. Overall life expectancy dropped nearly three years – from 79 to 76 – over the last two years, the largest two-year drop in 100 years.

Mark Zuckerberg is betting his company, Meta (née Facebook), on the “metaverse,” a concept he has been trying to explain to people. (His visual examples have not fared so well). According to Zuckerberg, “'A lot of people think that the metaverse is about a place, but one definition of this is it's about a time when basically immersive digital worlds become the primary way that we live our lives and spend our time.”