Another loss to Coronavirus

When I first lived here VGE had just lost power. A popular euphemism for going for a pee was “Je vais téléphoner à Giscard” :slightly_smiling_face: He was loved by many. France had low tax then and was a relatively uncomplicated place to live. I’m left of centre myself but, and I know it’s a total simplification and isn’t based on any deep analysis (life’s too short), my gut feeling for nearly forty years has been that Mitterrand and his so called “socialists” screwed it all up.

:+1: :arrow_up:This, basically
[I have a feeling this is going to be a long post, sorry]

While that might be true it is a fallacy to assume that there was some golden age when people lead “healthy lives”. In fact the burden of disease in the western world is just about the lowest that there has ever been - infection, that great historic killer of people before their time is a shadow of its former self (although on the up due to misuse of antibiotics) and, even with modern, “lifestyle” diseases we are living longer than ever before.

We haven’t - partly because before the mid-late 20th century we didn’t really have that sense anyway. The daily battle was getting enough  food, not worrying about too much.

Admittedly obesity is a growing problem and an important public health concern but just because there is more of it about does not mean that we have forgotten or never learned what a “good weight” is.

Sorry, I’m not clear why this is a bad thing? Yes we have lost the heavy manual lbour intensive jobs from much of the western (but not developed) world. A good thing too from the health point of view as these jobs wrought a terrible toll on people’s bodies.

Even obesity is not as bad as industrial disease.

Evidence? (EDIT: see my later post for further discussion).

In fact we are living in an era where our diet is more nutritious than ever and it is not “depleted in vitamins and minerals and trace elements” since availability of fresh food, historically in short supply and expensive is now easy and (comparatively) cheap (again, in the western world).

Yes, I agree that processed food is too carb, fat and calorie heavy and way too many people rely on it overmuch - but food quality and availability is (overall) at an all time high - almost no-one in the western world is (or at any rate was given that food poverty is on the increase) forced to eat an inadequate diet.

Um yes… and no. First of all be careful with the term “chemical” and the term “harmful” - water is a chemical and the deaths of 223 people in 2019 attest to the fact that it can be acutely harmful.

Certain chemicals certainly harmful and build up in the environment - dioxins are an excellent example of a group of chemicals with some unpleasantly toxic, hard to break down members- but we used to spread animal and human faeces on fields as fertiliser and that will give you toxic problems quicker than dioxins will.

With no, zéro, nil, nada, evidence that it actually harms human health at all.

OK, psychological well being is good too - how stressful was it being a serf in the middle ages. No I don’t know either but these are not uniquely 21st century problems.

We’re getting a bit woo-woo now Sue (as we were with the EMI thing), there is no evidence that the immune system in healthy individuals is remotely compromised - outside recognised conditions and inherited problems.

It is, honestly.

We certainly could do better - we could eliminate more disease, Smallpox has gone (a huge killer), polio nearly so, but there are many other infectious agents that cause much mortality and morbidity - I’m afraid complaining that there is too much obesity to a family who has just lost someone to, say, Malaria or their sight to Trachoma might not get you much sympathy.

We could stop people smoking, stop them drinking, make sure they exercise and are a healthy weight - and I think we’d see lifespan start to move up again (it has paused or even reversed in many western societies). But we can’t make people do these things.

And even if we did some people would still keel over in their 70’s, because genetics.

The biggest thing that we have done is make sure that most children are adequately fed and not living in open sewers. Managing disease is actually only a small part of it.

I sympathise - my mother spent the last 7 years of her life effectively in a vegetative state with Alzheimers (much longer than usual but she was physically healthy) - however as long as she was fed (and I do not mean by tube, spoon was fine right up to the end) she carried on and even threw off a couple of bouts of “the old man’s friend”.

I disagree with tube feeding and am sorry if that happened to your MIL - it must have been horrific to watch; but it is a difficult moral decision and we generally balk at the idea of actively hastening their demise. My mother, and quite possibly your MIL, were kept alive not because of advances in medicine but because social care is so much better - an important factor if you want people to regularly live to their 120’s

I also think it is a little inconsistent to, on the one hand suggest that we should all view our 120th birthday as a birthright and then complain people can’t “let go” when loved ones die sooner.

This is bad how?

Yes I take your point that diseases like type 2 diabetes are more common than they were a century or more ago. In part because they are diseases of middle and old age and in past times people were busy dying of infection. However is it really reasonable to say to someone who has just had a heart attack “sorry this is because you ate too many cream cakes - so you won’t be getting any treatment”?

I kind-of disagree with the last statement though - I can tell you how to live “healthfully and optimally” - I did earlier (and, actually, I think you have kind of covered the bases) - don’t smoke, don’t drink alcohol, keep your weight down and fitness up (I’d love to be able to follow my own advice but I like beer and cakes too much :slight_smile: ).

If we address these things (don’t know if we will) I’d agree we could start pushing average lifespan back up - but I don’t think we will push it far beyond 100 without some of that “medicalisation” that you seem to despise.

Heart disease is down because of statins
Cancer is down - actually this is mostly down to environmental factors, drop in smoking etc but we’re getting better at curing them as well (and keeping people alive with controlled disease longer, with good quality of life, even if we can’t cure them.
COPD is down (smoking)
Infection is down (mainly environmental but antibiotics as well).

However you look at it the world’s population, at least in the Western Hemisphere is about the healthiest it has ever been.

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@anon88169868 Sorry Paul, I’ve not read it all through, too late and I’m too tired, but just quickly want to say:
I’m not looking back to some golden age when we were fitter and healthier. But looking forward and saying we now know so much that we COULD be much fitter and healthier than in fact we are. I’m also saying that we start on the back foot all the time if we wait until we are ill and try and fix it. So much better to be 100% healthy.
And no I don’t think life was “better” when people worked in heavy industry, BUT and it’s a big BUT, my parents thought nothing of walking four miles to man a listening station during the war - that was the exercise they got, it didn’t need dressing up in lycra and paying a fee to a gym. I grew up in the 50s when we walked and cycled to get anywhere. There wasn’t a single fat child in my class (let alone obese).
I’m astonished you think our food is healthier - this has nothing to do with the amount of fresh greens we are eating, but that modern farming practices have depleted the minerals in the soil for over 50 years. Our food contains fewer nutrients.
Enough. Thank you for taking my post seriously. I’ll look more closely in the morrow.

This seems to me to be a sensible and enlightened understanding of health as a concept, not as an optimal condition of freedom from illness and the avoidance of injury through which everyone should live to110+.

Health is a definable and not-unlimited quantum of knowledge, experience, capability and available resource (including preventive measures) that is unequally distributed amongst the world’s peoples. And overlooked by a majority of those who fail to recognise its true nature.

The idea that everyone can potentially live to 110+ is as ludicrous as a belief that every one can or should grow to be 6’4" tall if they try hard enough and eat wisely.

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Not sure about the generation below us tho’? One one hand very poor diets (I don’t mean overweight, but poor nutrition) and at other end of scale a rejection of the medical expertise that has been deceloped.

Sorry another longish reply :slight_smile:

I actually agree with several things that you say, certainly reducing obesity, continuing to get tobacco and alcohol consumption down and encouraging exercise are important goals (but don’t lose track of the fact that these are largely 1st world problems1.

In UK in the 50’s, of course, food was scarce - there was still rationing until 1955 (I think or was it 1956) and food was comparatively more expensive - eg (from nutrition.org.uk) in 1952, average household expenditure on food was around 40%, it is now around 11% - the result, of course, is that we consume more.

Cars were also a rarity and car ownership has gone up - indeed the sheer amount of stuff (of all kinds) we have is massive compared with the 50’s - so, yes exercise “built in” to daily home and work life is less and we have to make a more conscious decision to be active, and not everyone has the time to do this.

I also agree that generally it is better to prevent ill health than it is to treat it. Probably France and the UK have improved things here over the years but I think that the US health service is very poor at primary prevention. There illness=profit so there is not much incentive to reduce the former. At a national level, of course, keeping the population in good health improves productivity and wealth but I’m not sure they see that - not even the Democrats (in case they appear too left wing and interfering).

But I disagree with you that food is less healthy today - I kind of get your point that it is easier to eat a diet too high in calories and sugar. But it is also easier and much cheaper to eat a healthy diet.

Finally I agree that modern farming has a lot to answer for in terms of soil quality - indeed there is a Scientific American paper which partly supports your view here - Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? | Scientific American

BUT we’re still talking about fresh fruit and veg having ~ 70% of the nutrients older varieties had, some of which is explained by modern varieties being larger and faster growing i.e it’s more complex than just soil quality, and “hugely depleted” is pushing it a bit. And the fact that you can afford more fresh fruit and veg more than offsets the loss.

Food poverty was greater - it’s no good the farmer being able to grow healthier carrots if you can’t afford them, food choice was narrower and we know one key to healthy eating is variety, there wasn’t as much sugar but there was a lot more bread - usually made with white, refined, flour (unless you go back to the 19th century when flour was often adulterated or the 18th century and before when wheat varieties were not as good and everything was generally awful health-wise).

It’s complex but we are still healthier than we have ever been - the snag is we are getting a bit less healthy overall at the ment (for some of the reasons you stated) and we could do with reversing that.

But, to get back to the original claim - everyone living to 120, or even 150 as some think possible is still in SciFi territory (and probably won’t be achieved, if at all, without medical input as well as a “healthy lifestyle”).

1] that is to say they are priorities for the 1st world as we've fixed a lot of the other problems, they are still important in the developing world but there are bigger problems to tackle there first.
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Yes I agree, for one reason or another we have peaked - probably, as you say, some of the effects of a worsening lifestyle are “catching up” as the pace slows in dealing with traditional killers as their  effects dwindle.