In America and other developed countries, human lifespan is the longest it’s ever been. Hoo-rah for Western medicine! Before you pop the cork on your champagne, consider that the percentage of our lives spent in good health is lower than it’s ever been.
Carrying around extra weight is a strong risk factor for every major disease and many of the minor ones. And in America…
-More than two-thirds (68.8 percent) of adults are considered to be overweight.
-More than one-third (35.7 percent) of adults are considered to be obese.
-More than 1 in 20 (6.3 percent) have extreme obesity. (Your 10-year outlook is grim) [1]
Statistics of this startling scale and caliber are to be found with respect to such conditions as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimers, ADHD/ADD, autism, cerebrovascular disease, food allergies/insensitivities, poor vision, depression, insomnia, many types of cancer, infertility, and the list goes on.
We have discovered how to live long, but in the process forgotten how to live well. Abraham Lincoln and his 19th century cohorts would not have recognized any of these conditions; not just because they didn’t have the awareness, but because such diseases (or should I say malfunctions?) did not exist in those times. They instead had to wrestle with the likes of Pneumonia, Dysentery, Tuberculosis, Typhoid, and Cholera (true diseases) which have since been bested by antibiotics.
It should be said however, that the likes of our great-great-grandparents, were they fortunate enough not to be struck down by infection, were likely hardy and capable folk into old age.
This is true across the animal kingdom. There are 18th and 19th century accounts of the mules used to build canals in early America by pulling heavy digging equipment. While the mules did, of course, eventually die, they never showed obvious signs. No loss of strength, no decline in physiological capability, and in most cases, no infection. They reached their full lifespan in tact, and then their death came immediately as though it were programmed for that date.
Notice that I only had to turn the clock back 100 years or so to erase the paradigm of dying from anything but infection and old age. Let’s rewind even further (as I often will) to the Pleistocene Epoch (2,600,000 - 12,000 years ago), when humans lived on the fickle blade of natural selection. It should be said that we can only really speculate about their lifestyle based on fossil evidence, telltale signs in our own DNA, the lifestyles of modern hunter-gatherer populations, and deductive reasoning using the guiding heuristics of natural selection.
We can say with high certainty that our ancestors lived in roaming bands of hunter-gatherers who had relatively complex social dynamics/tribal roles, and were opportunistic feeders who likely only ate a few meals per week. Homo sapien skeletons found dating to this epoch were extremely robust. Even the bones that showed evidence of experiencing 70+ years (ice-age summers) were larger and denser than those of today’s NFL linemen - not osteoporotic and hunched like today’s 70-somethings…
You see, our ancestors from the Pleistocene may have had an average lifespan of about 25, but this is due mostly to high infant-mortality. A mother carrying an infant in her womb or her arms is a prime target for predators and is also more resource-needy - it’s a vulnerable time to be pregnant or very young in this epoch. What is important to note is that those who did survive to old age, often lived as long as modern humans sans the new phenomenon known as ageing.
There is no time in history I would rather live than now, but as we move forward, let’s take some lessons from bygone eras. That’s what this blog will be all about.