CDC survey finds teens are doing better, but the new report leaves out drugs and sex

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week that American teenagers are eating more fruits and vegetables, playing more team sports and reporting less persistent sadness than two years ago. The findings come from a redesigned flagship survey report that, for the first time in decades, omits national data on teen substance use, sexual behavior and violence exposure that had anchored the same survey series since the early 1990s.

The Youth Health in Focus report, published Sept. 21, draws on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a nationally representative poll of high school students that CDC has run every two years for more than 35 years. This year's edition carries a new title, a narrower five-topic structure, and a different audience in mind: state and local officials rather than the broader public-health research community that has relied on the survey's demographic breakdowns for decades.

The numbers behind the gains

According to the CDC's own summary of the data, the share of high schoolers reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness fell to 33% in 2025, down from 40% in 2023 and 42% in 2021. Students who said they had seriously considered suicide dropped to 14% in 2025 from 20% in 2023 and 22% in 2021, while those who made a suicide plan fell to 12% from 18% over the same four-year span.

• Daily fruit consumption rose to 39% of students in 2025, up from 33% in 2023; daily vegetable consumption rose to 63% from 58%.
• Students drinking plain water three or more times a day rose to 58% from 54%.
• Sports team participation climbed to 58% of students in 2025, up from 52% in 2023, though daily attendance in physical education classes did not improve.
• Sleep of eight or more hours a night was essentially flat, reported by 24% of students in 2025 versus 23% in 2023.
• Hourly-or-more social media use edged down slightly, to 36% from 37%, but the share of students who reported texting or emailing while driving rose to 46% from 42%.

CDC Deputy Director and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jennifer Shuford framed the results as evidence that public-health efforts are working. "These are meaningful improvements, and they show that progress is possible when schools, families, and communities work together to support young people," she said in the agency's release.

A 35-year survey with a new frame

The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System has historically tracked more than a dozen categories of adolescent health and risk, including tobacco and vaping, alcohol and other drug use, sexual activity and contraception, experiences of bullying and dating violence, and mental health broken down by race, sexual orientation and gender identity. Those categories filled the survey's prior editions, published under the title Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report.

This year's report focuses on five domains — dietary behavior, physical activity, sleep, digital behavior, and mental health and suicide risk — the same priorities emphasized by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" initiative. Coverage of substance use, sexual behavior and violence, along with demographic breakdowns for LGBTQ+ students that appeared in the 2023 edition, does not appear in the new document.

What was left out, and who notices

Adolescent-medicine specialists say the shift matters less for what changed in teenagers' lives than for what state health departments, school districts and researchers will now be able to see. Dr. Scott Hadland, chief of adolescent medicine at Mass General Brigham, told reporters the report is "missing rich data on substance use" at a time when overdose remains a leading cause of death for young people and firearms remain the single leading cause of death among American children and teenagers overall.

Dr. Vera Feuer, chief clinical officer at the Child Mind Institute, pointed to the disappearance of school-connectedness measures and the absence of any reference to LGBTQ+ students, a population the survey has long shown reports substantially higher rates of bullying, depression and suicidal thoughts than their peers. Ariel Beccia, a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the report's framing obscures whether the gains are evenly shared.

"Overall, we see things are getting better, but for who? Oftentimes, it's the more advantaged groups," Beccia said.

Coverage by NBC News and a subsequent NPR analysis distributed to public radio stations nationwide both noted that the report does not disaggregate its headline statistics by race, ethnicity or income, a departure that makes it harder to tell whether the reported improvements reached students in lower-income schools or districts with fewer counselors and health services.

What happens next

CDC officials have not said the underlying data on substance use and sexual behavior has been discontinued. The survey instrument itself still asks students those questions, and the agency continues to post detailed data tables and an interactive explorer tool through its main Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System site, alongside a technical-notes document for the new report. What has changed is which findings CDC chooses to package and promote as its central, publicly promoted analysis — the version most likely to be cited by school boards, state legislators and local health departments deciding where to direct prevention dollars.

Parents and school administrators who want the fuller picture will need to seek out the raw datasets rather than rely on the summary document, researchers said, a step that requires more technical skill than reading a press release. Advocacy groups focused on adolescent mental health and LGBTQ+ youth said they plan to press CDC to restore full demographic breakdowns and the substance-use and violence sections when the next survey cycle is published in 2027. In the meantime, the agency's public messaging is set: teenagers, by CDC's own new measure, are sleeping about the same, driving more distracted, and by several other yardsticks, doing better than they were four years ago.