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Yes and no. Certainly people who grew up before the 1960s or so got generally more exercise, walked to school, walked to the bus stop, ate less fast food etc.
But there were horrible additives in food and packaging, like lead, pesticides, and other toxins. People just accidentally ate better simply because a lot of modern techniques of preserving foods longer, and even refrigeration, weren't as common.
Air and water pollution was also terrible. American cities up until around 1972 were really bad. Of course, in a sense, we merely exported our pollution to other places like Taiwan, Bangladesh, and China.
But overall, someone growing up around the turn of the 20th Century and getting most of their food from the local farms including daily delivery of fresh milk, home gardening of veggies, maybe a chicken or two for eggs... they were eating better.
If we're talking about people who "lived to their 90s," we are still talking about people who didn't experience the worst parts of the latter 1900s until after they were fully grown. Remember most people still didn't even live in the cities until after WWII. While there were toxins in foods, there was air and water pollution, the levels were still pretty low until the super industrial boom after WWII.
Now, if you want to talk about people who are in their 70s now, you have somewhat more of a point.
And my major point, still very much in evidence, is that the environmental situation for young people today is ever more worse than it was for my generation or for my parents' generation or even my grandparents' generation.
The odds have gotten worse for young people today. People have these anecdotes of their grandparents living into their 90s with bad eating habits all their lives...except that the food supply, the environment, and their level of activity had been vastly different when their grandparents were young. They were declining from a significantly higher level of health than young people born in the 80s or later.
The military has seen it firsthand. Back when I enlisted in the early 70s, the military didn't worry about "fluffy" recruits. They were confident that a few weeks of daily exercise and controlled eating would whittle the fluff off any basically healthy 18-year-old youth.
Not so today. Kids today have a different kind of fat that isn't burned off by the same training that has worked for a century before. I suspect the problem is that it's old fat, accumulating since they were toddlers. Or it may be a matter of the chemistry involved, such as bodies full of Omega 6 fatty acids, where in the past it was Omega 3 fat.
Whatever has caused the difference, the military response to this new problem has been to demand recruits meet weight standards before being accepted for training.
Kids today are simply more obese than they were in the 70s. A fluffy recruit in the 70s might even be seen as normal today. You cannot train someone whose 100lbs overweight with the rest of the recruits.
I suspect that fast food is demonized because nearly all of it is really very unhealthy, cheap food. High in salt, fat and calories. What could possibly go wrong?
Just for reference I have a 30 waist and don’t have a belly. I do short, light workouts with weights a couple times a week and go for walks occasionally on weekends when I can. I also eat fast food like burgers, fried chicken, pizza around 4 or 5 times a week.
I like these foods but people sometimes at work and at gatherings make comments about me eating McDonalds, Harvey’s etc like “how can you eat that crap?” And “it’s just empty calories”. So what? If someone eats lots of vegetables and protein as well I don’t see why it can’t be part of a balanced diet. It tastes good, is fast so I don’t have to pack a lunch always, and I don’t see how it’s any worse than someone eating sugary frozen yoghurt or frozen drinks from Starbucks, which many of my colleagues do.
My point is, I wish society wouldn’t shame people so much for the kinds of foods they like. You can eat anything and have it as part of a balanced diet, it’s just about moderation.
Thoughts?
My thoughts are, I can't eat that food anymore but I could when I was younger and playing basketball every day. I wish I had eaten less fast food, sugarry coffee, etc. when I was younger. Lastly, eating some foods not good for you is okay if it's occasional, eventually there's a price to pay for excessively eating poor quality food.
Just for reference I have a 30 waist and don’t have a belly. I do short, light workouts with weights a couple times a week and go for walks occasionally on weekends when I can. I also eat fast food like burgers, fried chicken, pizza around 4 or 5 times a week.
I like these foods but people sometimes at work and at gatherings make comments about me eating McDonalds, Harvey’s etc like “how can you eat that crap?” And “it’s just empty calories”. So what? If someone eats lots of vegetables and protein as well I don’t see why it can’t be part of a balanced diet. It tastes good, is fast so I don’t have to pack a lunch always, and I don’t see how it’s any worse than someone eating sugary frozen yoghurt or frozen drinks from Starbucks, which many of my colleagues do.
My point is, I wish society wouldn’t shame people so much for the kinds of foods they like. You can eat anything and have it as part of a balanced diet, it’s just about moderation.
Thoughts?
How's your blood lipid profile? You know, autopsies of young men killed in Vietnam found something like 30% of them - young, fit, visually healty, mostly in their late teens and early 20s) already had coronary artery disease.
I wouldn't care except that if you show up at the ER with a massive MI at age 40, it'll be our shared-risk health insurance that'll pay for your care.
How's your blood lipid profile? You know, autopsies of young men killed in Vietnam found something like 30% of them - young, fit, visually healty, mostly in their late teens and early 20s) already had coronary artery disease.
I wouldn't care except that if you show up at the ER with a massive MI at age 40, it'll be our shared-risk health insurance that'll pay for your care.
It's incredibly cold and judgmental to paint everyone with the same broad brush like that.
I care; I want everyone to be healthy. Some people eat junky food all their lives and die at 95. Others are genetically predisposed to obesity or early death, even with very healthy lifestyles.
Probably most people need more exercise than they get, most people probably should eat less sugary foods and processed flours and chemicals.
But there are people who just have bad DNA. That's what our insurance pays for -- all the varieties of humans. We don't get to pick and choose who deserves what. Try to educate everyone but don't judge; we all have our failings, every single one of us.
How's your blood lipid profile? You know, autopsies of young men killed in Vietnam found something like 30% of them - young, fit, visually healty, mostly in their late teens and early 20s) already had coronary artery disease.
What is your source for that? How much coronary heart disease?
What I found was this:
Quote:
Postmortem coronary angiography and dissection of hearts from 105 United States soldiers killed in Vietnam demonstrate that (1) 45% have some evidence of atherosclerosis; (2) 5% have gross evidence of severe coronary atherosclerosis; and (3) no patient had angiographic evidence of severe coronary narrowing, and in only one patient was any degree of stenosis observed.
"Some" evidence, sure. Only five percent had "gross evidence," and a bad diet even of whole foods can result in that.
A study of Korean soldiers killed during the Korean War showed:
Quote:
In 77.3% of the hearts, some evidence of atherosclerosis was discovered. [1] For 35% of the cases, the disease was limited to “fibrous thickening or streaking causing insignificant luminal narrowing.” [1] For 13.3% of the population, plaques had narrowed the lumina by 10%. For 5.3% of the population, the lumina had narrowed by 90%. [1] For the majority of cases, the atherosclerotic lesions were found in the “proximal third of the left coronary artery […] usually thickest on the epicardial side of the lumen” or “in the distal third of the artery just proximal to the bifurcation of the circumflex artery in a more medial position.” [1]
This gives us a better idea of what "some evidence" means.
But this is really interesting:
Quote:
Atherosclerosis, with its clinical manifestations such as ischaemic heart disease (IHD), stroke and peripheral arterial disease, is a leading vascular disease worldwide1. The belief that atherosclerosis is a disease of the modern society is inaccurate.
Studies in mummies dating as far back as 3300 BCE have evidenced the presence of atherosclerosis in all vascular beds and across various geographic regions, cultures and lifestyles of that time1,2. Although predisposing factors for atherosclerosis in ancient populations remain obscure, the use of domesticated animals (and consequently a fatty diet), air pollution (exposure to open fire and cooking in living quarters) and frequent infections leading to increased inflammatory burden have been postulated1.
The whole-genome study of the Tyrolean Iceman, a 5300-yr-old glacier mummy from the Alps, revealed several single-nucleotide polymorphisms known to predispose to atherosclerosis in contemporary humans2. These observations may suggest that atherosclerosis is an inherent component of human ageing2 with a strong gene-environmental interplay in which genes underlie vulnerability whereas the environmental factors determine whether the disease will become clinically manifest3.
In the Ebers Papyrus dating back to 1555 BCE, the Egyptian doctors gave the following description of angina pectoris (or myocardial infarction): ‘If thou examinist a man for illness in his cardia, and he has pains in his arms, in his breasts and on one side of his cardia…it is death threatening him’4. This probably represents the oldest documented description of clinical IHD.
Let's be sure we keep in mind that atherosclerosis isn't the only issue we're concerned with.
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