We Aren’t Getting Healthier and Living Longer
admin October 10th, 2007
Americans, at least in the past, have crowed about how good our health is – that we’re living longer and feeling better than most everyone else in the world, and we’ve bragged about how good our diet is compared to the rest of the world.
Wrong!
There are now a number of studies, one just out*, that say the reverse is more likely to be true, and it looks like once again our boasting has been filled with more hubris than truth.
The reality is, that after a generation of increasing life spans and improving health, a number of studies have shown that trend is reversing – and researchers are worried. Although our most elderly citizens are in fact living longer than in the past, younger people are not so lucky. They are in significantly worse health than the previous generation, by their own report, and this is a strong predictor of life span – the poorer one reports their health to be, the shorter their actual life expectancy is.
The self-reports examined in the new studies show that more people are having more difficulty with even the most basic day-to-day activities of daily living like climbing the stairs and getting up out of a chair; far more report having high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes than ever before, and disability rates among the younger generation are rising fast.
Many of these problems can be tracked directly to the obesity epidemic: two thirds of all Americans are overweight! We’re eating far too much of the wrong stuff and we’re becoming more and more physically lazy.
When is the last time you didn’t use the remote instead of walking to the TV to do it manually? How many times do you use the handicap automatic door opener in a large building instead of opening it by hand? Do you always use the elevator instead of the stairs? Do you drive to the corner store instead of walking? And there are many more questions we need to ask of our selves.
Fat tastes good doesn’t it? In fact our favorite meals are pretty much fat, salt and sugar burgers. When you say it that way, Uggh!
In addition, the baby boomers report having substantially more stress in their lives than the previous generation, including long commutes, taking care of both kids and elderly parents, and that many are working two or more jobs in an attempt to keep up with their spending (most often unsuccessfully).
This again tracks directly to the simple living cure: living close to work and family rather than participating in the traditional car-centered urban sprawl, and building mutual support communities within our churches and local communities to share the burdens of caring for our elders and kids.
This leads directly to two of our basic premises in Christian simple living:
1. Less is better – we need to stop eating so much of the wrong stuff.
2. God wants us to be good stewards of what he gave us rather than ignoring or wasting them – we need to take action to be good stewards of our bodies just as we are to be good stewards of the environment.
* The study was conducted by Beth J. Soldo, Ph.D., Olivia Mitchell, Ph.D., and John McCabe, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, and Rania Tfaily, Ph.D., of Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, and published in print and online by the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).