A report issued this week by Washington University's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that in the decade from 1997-2007, American life expectancy effectively stagnated, with significant drops in life expectancy in nearly a thousand rural counties. Preliminary data through 2009 indicates a precipitous drop in the national life expectancy in just those two years, from 75.5 years to 73.5 years for men and from 81 to 80.8 years for women.
What's more interesting to me is that life expectancy in Victorian England, when you pull out infant mortality that skews the stats, is 75 years for men, and 73 years for women, according to a detailed study published in the 2008 Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. So in the intervening years, we've drastically decreased infant mortality due to the advent of antibiotics, and we've decreased maternal mortality with fewer women dying in childbirth, and women having fewer children with the advent of birth control, which also adds to women's lifespans. Men's longevity effectively has not changed.
Moreover, people of the Victorian era in England ate about twice as many calories as we do each day--but all of it was non-processed, unrefined foods with little added sugar and no additives, preservatives, coloration, no pesticides, insecticides and herbicides, just all real food. They were healthier, the researchers at the Royal Society of Medicine concluded, as they were constantly exposed to biota that challenged, and then strengthened, their immune systems; their diet was rich in omega-3s and a wealth of other nutrients, with no such thing as empty calories; and, they moved all day. Walking, riding, lifting, digging, carrying, whatever it may be. All labor was manual labor, and merely going to the store involved walking there then carrying your packages back. These folks were strong.
The reasons for our present drop in life expectancy? The press coverage of this present report release emphasize lack of health insurance and the need for more mammograms and other screening machinery and techniques. Those explanations would bolster the interests of the medical industry which has exploded in size and cost during precisely the same time period that our life expectancy has been dropping. The other explanations from the report have been barely mentioned. They are obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, and smoking.
When the agribiz lobby fearmongers about food security, they talk as if the US is going to starve to death if we don't ensure that more chemical laden wheat gets turned into refined white flour products each year. But that is not the problem we are faced with. The problem we are faced with is that we are eating far too much of the wrong types of foods, and it costing us tons of money and killing us off before our time. A return to a saner diet rich in non-chemical-laden, non-processed, unrefined foods will make us healthier and wealthier. Walking to the garden or the local farmers market to procure it rather than driving to the box store wouldn't hurt, either. Hanging on to our burgers-fries-cola American lifestyle in the face of skyrocketing health care costs and plummeting life expectancies is the height of folly.
Eat your veggies, and save the nation.
What's more interesting to me is that life expectancy in Victorian England, when you pull out infant mortality that skews the stats, is 75 years for men, and 73 years for women, according to a detailed study published in the 2008 Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. So in the intervening years, we've drastically decreased infant mortality due to the advent of antibiotics, and we've decreased maternal mortality with fewer women dying in childbirth, and women having fewer children with the advent of birth control, which also adds to women's lifespans. Men's longevity effectively has not changed.
Moreover, people of the Victorian era in England ate about twice as many calories as we do each day--but all of it was non-processed, unrefined foods with little added sugar and no additives, preservatives, coloration, no pesticides, insecticides and herbicides, just all real food. They were healthier, the researchers at the Royal Society of Medicine concluded, as they were constantly exposed to biota that challenged, and then strengthened, their immune systems; their diet was rich in omega-3s and a wealth of other nutrients, with no such thing as empty calories; and, they moved all day. Walking, riding, lifting, digging, carrying, whatever it may be. All labor was manual labor, and merely going to the store involved walking there then carrying your packages back. These folks were strong.
The reasons for our present drop in life expectancy? The press coverage of this present report release emphasize lack of health insurance and the need for more mammograms and other screening machinery and techniques. Those explanations would bolster the interests of the medical industry which has exploded in size and cost during precisely the same time period that our life expectancy has been dropping. The other explanations from the report have been barely mentioned. They are obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, and smoking.
When the agribiz lobby fearmongers about food security, they talk as if the US is going to starve to death if we don't ensure that more chemical laden wheat gets turned into refined white flour products each year. But that is not the problem we are faced with. The problem we are faced with is that we are eating far too much of the wrong types of foods, and it costing us tons of money and killing us off before our time. A return to a saner diet rich in non-chemical-laden, non-processed, unrefined foods will make us healthier and wealthier. Walking to the garden or the local farmers market to procure it rather than driving to the box store wouldn't hurt, either. Hanging on to our burgers-fries-cola American lifestyle in the face of skyrocketing health care costs and plummeting life expectancies is the height of folly.
Eat your veggies, and save the nation.
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