CDC’s latest youth behavior report offers a narrower look at teen health

Filed 2h ago · Via Stateline · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: The White House from Washington, DC · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

The CDC's 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey report runs 36 pages, down from 88 in 2023, and narrows its focus to diet, physical activity, sleep, digital behavior and mental health while dropping national findings on substance use, sexual behavior, violence and demographic disparities that anchored prior editions. The underlying data on those topics still exists on CDC's website; it simply isn't part of the featured report anymore.

Some numbers look good: fruit and vegetable consumption, water intake and sports participation are all up, and reported sadness, suicidal ideation and suicide planning all declined from 2021 highs. Other longer-term trends worsened, including daily physical activity, adequate sleep and breakfast consumption, all lower than in 2015.

CDC deputy director Dr. Jennifer Shuford credited schools, families and communities for the improvements in a news release, while the report itself, unlike its 2023 predecessor, makes no mention of LGBTQ+ students or gender identity, a category the survey asked about for the first time just two years ago.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Cutting a report in half and calling it progress is a neat trick if nobody checks what got left on the cutting room floor. The data on drugs, sex and violence didn't disappear, it just stopped getting invited to the good pages, right alongside any student who used to show up as an LGBTQ+ data point. A government report is supposed to tell you what's true, not just what fits the current administration's preferred five topics.

Source: Read the original at Stateline → Scored: Bad Ideas (clean) · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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