Americans Are Tired. That Seems Worth Paying Attention To.
A new CDC report found that one in six American adults feels very tired or exhausted most days. The study does not tell us why, but the numbers raise a larger question about health, food, and whether the systems we have built are helping people feel well.
I came across a Washington Post story recently with a pretty simple headline: Americans are tired.
It was based on a new report from the CDC looking at fatigue among American adults. The numbers stopped me.
In 2024, 71.5% of American adults said they had felt very tired or exhausted at least some days during the previous three months. More troubling, 16.6% — about one in six adults — said they felt very tired or exhausted most days or every day.
That is a lot of people walking around tired.
And it isn't just older people
One of the things I found most surprising was who reported the most fatigue.
Among adults ages 18 to 34, 19.5% reported frequent fatigue. Among people 65 and older, it was 12.9%. Women reported it more often than men, and fatigue was also more common among lower-income and rural Americans.
The rural number caught my attention in particular.
About 20.5% of adults living in nonmetropolitan areas reported frequent fatigue, compared with 14.5% in large central metropolitan areas.
I don't think we should read too much into any one statistic. But I also don't think we should ignore it.
Being tired affects real life
The CDC wasn't just asking whether people could use an extra cup of coffee.
They defined frequent fatigue as feeling very tired or exhausted most days or every day over a three-month period.
Among people experiencing frequent fatigue, 36% said they had limitations in the work they could do. They were also much more likely to report difficulty participating in social activities.
So this isn't just an inconvenience.
People are feeling it at work, at home and in their everyday lives.
The important question is why
This is where I think we need to be careful.
The CDC study does not tell us why Americans are tired. It doesn't prove that the cause is our food, lack of exercise, poor sleep, stress, medication, chronic disease or anything else.
There are undoubtedly many causes.
I certainly don't believe eating a steak is going to solve America's fatigue problem.
But I do think these numbers should make us curious.
We spend an extraordinary amount of money treating health problems in this country. We have more medications, supplements, specialists, fitness trackers and health information available to us than at any point in history.
And yet one in six American adults says they feel very tired or exhausted most days.
That seems worth paying attention to.
Where food fits into this
I spend most of my time thinking about food because I'm a farmer.
Over the last few years I've become increasingly interested in the difference between simply consuming calories and actually nourishing ourselves.
Those aren't always the same thing.
Our food system has become very good at producing cheap, convenient calories. We can eat almost anywhere, at almost any hour, and food companies have gotten very good at making products we want to keep eating.
But I think it is reasonable to ask a more basic question:
Is the food we're eating helping us feel healthy?
That doesn't mean food explains everything. It certainly doesn't mean there's one diet everyone should follow.
It simply means food deserves a place in the conversation.
Farmers have a small part to play
At Tyner Pond Farm, our role in all of this is pretty modest.
We raise cattle on grass. We move them across pasture and give that ground time to recover. We raise chickens on pasture. We work with other local farmers who care about how their animals and land are managed.
We're trying to produce real food from healthy land.
I don't claim that our beef or chicken is medicine.
It's food.
But food is something people eat every day, year after year. That makes the way we produce it worth thinking about.
When nearly three out of four Americans say they have recently felt very tired or exhausted, and one in six feels that way most days, I think we should be willing to ask some bigger questions about health.
Not just how we treat sickness.
But how we eat, how we live, and whether the systems we've built are actually helping people feel well.
That's a conversation farmers should be part of.
Sources: CDC National Health Statistics Report No. 221 and The Washington Post.
