Preparing foods By Salting And Fermentation (cow, vacuum, price, America)

[Woof]

Originally Posted by emilybh

Then there are the mercury fillings in our teeth; cancer virus in the polio vaccine and fluoride in our water. The list goes on!

Yeah, but whaddya gonna do. Our ancestors had it even worse.

[emilybh]

Originally Posted by Woof

Yeah, but whaddya gonna do. Our ancestors had it even worse.

No that cartoon is wrong. Look at the Hunzas in Pakistan. They live 'till they are 120 or more on a regular basis and have very primitive lives. They certainly don't take prescription drugs or eat processed foods!

Records show that if people survived early childhood i they probably lived to be AT LEAST into their 70's or 80's or much older and most people died healthy in their sleep.

The AVERAGE age of death may have been 30 when you average in all the babies born that died during or after childbirth or from some childhood disease. Remember they didn't have incubators back then. The mean age of death or the age at which most people died was FAR above 30, my friend.
http://www.cybertown.com/slowaging2.html

http://www.essentialoilcookbook.com/html/long-life.htm

[Woof]

There's no good evidence that the Hunza live longer lives than average, in fact I'd guess from what I know of Pakistan that they live shorter than average lives.

An essay appearing in many editions of Guinness World Records in the 1980s lists four categories of recent claims: "In late life, very old people often tend to advance their ages at the rate of about 17 years per decade .... Several celebrated super-centenarians (over 110 years) are believed to have been double lives (father and son, relations with the same names or successive bearers of a title) .... A number of instances have been commercially sponsored, while a fourth category of recent claims are those made for political ends ...."[4] Guinness implies other (historical) categories of longevity traditions to exist as well; this distinction is elaborated in more detail in Lucian Boia's 2004 book Forever Young: A Cultural History of Longevity from Antiquity to the Present. Both Arthur Custance[5] and demographers Jacques Vallin and France Meslé[6] make this distinction explicit, drawing a direct comparison and contrast of "longevity in antiquity" (the genealogies of Genesis) with "longevity in historical times" (common-era cases through twentieth-century news reports), though with differing conclusions. Actuary Walter G. Bowerman states that longevity assertions originate mainly in remote, underdeveloped regions, among illiterate peoples, evidenced by nothing more than family testimony.[7]..... Longevity myths - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here's a list of life expectancies by nation. Notice that the nations with the top ten life expectancies have greatly varying diets and lifestyles:

Japan 82.6 79.0 86.1
2 Hong Kong 82.2 79.4 85.1
3 Iceland 81.8 80.2 83.3
4 Switzerland 81.7 79.0 84.2
5 Australia 81.2 78.9 83.6
6 Spain 80.9 77.7 84.2
7 Sweden 80.9 78.7 83.0
8 Israel 80.7 78.5 82.8
9 Macau 80.7 78.5 82.8
10 France (metropolitan) ............. List of countries by life expectancy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here's Pakistan way down at 135 Pakistan 65.5 65.2 65.8

The point of me writing this is simply to say that industrial toxins in the environment aren't the biggest influence on health as far as I can see, and that diet is less important to health and longevity than I once thought as long as one doesn't overeat. Avoid the industrial toxins if you can, but there's no need to obsess on them or spend time worrying - you're a lot more likely to live a long and reasonably healthy life in an industrialized nation even with the pollution, than a primitive rural society.

[Wilson513]

WE have been through this "how long did people live back in the day" so many times it has become tedious.

Longevity has been achieved as a consequence of home and workplace safety, conventional medicine and drugs (not homeopathic concoctions), and public water purification and sanitary sewers. If anything, infant mortality today brings down the longevity numbers because endless numbers of children who would have been born dead 100 years ago are live born and die in days or weeks because they never had a chance to begin with. Their short lives are included in overall life expectancy.

[emilybh]

Originally Posted by emilybh

No that cartoon is wrong. Look at the Hunzas in Pakistan. They live 'till they are 120 or more on a regular basis and have very primitive lives. They certainly don't take prescription drugs or eat processed foods!

Records show that if people survived early childhood i they probably lived to be AT LEAST into their 70's or 80's or much older and most people died healthy in their sleep.

The AVERAGE age of death may have been 30 when you average in all the babies born that died during or after childbirth or from some childhood disease. Remember they didn't have incubators back then. The mean age of death or the age at which most people died was FAR above 30, my friend.
THE SECRETS OF HUNZA WATER

Traditional Hunza Diet - Longevity

"...The traditional Hunza diet, on which The Essential Oil Cookbook is based, consists of unprocessed whole foods rich in fiber; 40% calories from whole grains, 30% calories from vegeables, 15% from fruits, 10% beans, 4% nuts/seeds and only 1% from animal products. The Hunzas ate 80% of their vegetables and 100% of their fruit raw. They consumed 10-15% of total calories from fat and were never obese. Theirs was a low fat diet. These people did not need a weight-loss program - they already had it!..."

[Woof]

And yet, they have a shorter lifespan than average from what we know about Pakistanis in general (though they don't keep formal, accurate records out in the villages). Amazingly, the Swiss with their high fat diet abundant in meat (often fried in lard or butter) and dairy products, and relatively low in veggies other than fried potatoes, are the fourth longest-lived people in the world, while the Hunzas are probably around #135 if they're anything like other Pakistanis.

Go figure.

[kinkytoes]

Woof, you're funny but I am going to agree with Emily. After studying macroeconomics, biology etc and being born in a 3rd world country etc...I think the whole lifespan thing is BS. It has no relation to health. IMO btw I am not a scientist.

I mean, anybody can keep a barely breathing walking carcass alive for decades with additional surgeries and treatments. I also think in other countries yes life is dangerous so a lot of people are allowed to die "naturally" from violence and disease. If they lived in a country w/ inexpensive medical treatment (for those who cannot fight off disease) they may live even longer than the people in the safer countries.

I mean, how does the "lifespan" of the ones who die impact the lifespan of a normal healthy person not caught up in a conflict? It doesn't mean the people overall are less healthy. I'm not sure if I'm explaining clearly...but I don't know if overall it is so bad if the ones who can't withstand the disease die...you end up with a resistant gene-pool.

[Woof]

Well, OK, I'm not aware of any stats that show Pakistan or their Hunzas to be healthy longer than the Swiss. In fact the Swiss seem to stay healthy longer than most countries, despite their supposedly unhealthy diets. Here's an index of HEALTHY life expectancy by nation (Definition: Average number of years that a person can expect to live in "full health" by taking into account years lived in less than full health due to disease and/or injury.) Note that Australia is number 2, and they're surely not known for being raw food vegetarians:

1 Japan 74.5
2 Australia 73.2
3 France 73.1
4 Sweden 73.0
5 Spain 72.8
6 Italy 72.7
7 Greece 72.5
8 Switzerland 72.5
9 Monaco 72.4
10 Andorra 72.3
.
.
125 Pakistan 55.9

[Woof]

Originally Posted by Wilson513

......Longevity has been achieved as a consequence of home and workplace safety, conventional medicine and drugs (not homeopathic concoctions), and public water purification and sanitary sewers......

It seems like you might be right. The stats don't support the idea that diet is a major factor in healthy longevity. But eyeballing that last list, I'd guess that most of the top 10 countries have good public hygiene and universal health care (and most universal healthcare systems that I've looked into are about conventional medicine combined with preventive education).

[gwynedd1]

Originally Posted by Wilson513

WE have been through this "how long did people live back in the day" so many times it has become tedious.

Longevity has been achieved as a consequence of home and workplace safety, conventional medicine and drugs (not homeopathic concoctions), and public water purification and sanitary sewers. If anything, infant mortality today brings down the longevity numbers because endless numbers of children who would have been born dead 100 years ago are live born and die in days or weeks because they never had a chance to begin with. Their short lives are included in overall life expectancy.

Hi Wilson513,

Civilization shortened life spans before basic sanitation was discovered. It is perhaps the single most important step. Nostradamus so famous for his quatrains was actually quite the pioneer in basic sanitation.

Certainly modern advances have helped, but that is despite the food going in the wrong direction rather recently. Small populations in fertile climates, living very primitive life styles, would generally live quite long on average. .