So a common misconception of the past is life expectancy. In many societies if you weren't the lowest of the low (enslaved peoples usually) if you survived childhood you might be looking at living to 70s if male. Averages are brought down by graveyards of dead kids and women.
My great-grandmother (UK) was born in 1898, last-but-one of about 10 or 11 siblings born since the 1870s; about half died in childhood, the rest lived to normal old ages (she made it to 95).
That’s how it was. The child mortality rate was CLOSE TO HALF OF ALL CHILDREN. And now they think this is amazing and we should return to it. Because…the food didn’t have preservatives. This is madness.
YUM "Food companies". But they're why we're all sick. Profit off of anything and who cares who dies? This includes "healthy" supplements which are basically llike the guys in old westerns selling elixirs.
And disease depended on where you lived. Some regions had sort of a ...standoff with smallpox. It would breeze through every decade, killing kids, not adults. The adults had all been survivors as kids. Regions which didn't have this relationship with the virus would have it come through...
and adults which hadn't experienced that culling as kids, welp it slaughtered terribly. And because it was killing adults which run society, it crippled those cities/villages when the adults had a die off. Then as major cities became a thing in various civs, you'd see plagues because travelers
would travel and bring diseases to new places where the virus or bacterium would go BONKERS Good plumbing, vaccines and fluoride in water made the most significant impacts to human health.
And if you didn't die of disease in childhood: good possibility you would following either injury or childbirth. In most wars in history, more people died from disease than from direct wounds. And huge percentages of women died while or immediately after giving birth.
Flouride is the ground water; only heard it added in the USA. Most other places just rely on it in toothpaste. Knowledge of bacteria / washing your hands (sterilized) made a huge impact too. ;)
My contrarian brain was ready to mount an argument but, well, yes. Yes to all the things that you said. The average life expectancy of the period was heavily based on stillborn and infant mortality.
It gives a frankly wacky idea of what an alderman would be. Gary, in his thirties, would not be the wiseman of the town.
There were a lot more death sentences before modern medicine. Getting a really nasty wound and not being able to get someplace to clean it out could be the end. But yes, obviously infant and mother mortality were the biggest stat swingers with epidemics in towns/cities coming next.
Well, now I'm expecting RFK Jr. to go after flush toilets
I wouldn’t worry, he gives every indication of being the kind of person who drinks out of them
He can pry my bidet from my cold dead hand.
Don't give him any ideas!
Im guessing soap or other things he probably doesn’t use
gotta conserve water for the server farms
I would add antibiotics to that list
Europe doesn't have fluoride in water and their life expectancy is higher.
We used to have it, but replaced it with free dental care for children. (though that is disappearing too in many countries, so we'll see how well that goes in the future)
They typically put it in table salt instead. Same goal, different route.
Iodine in table salt, flouride in toothpaste which is used almost universally
Ah, now I get it. Thanks.
Most of Europe also has socialized medicine and a lower cost of living. Your statement is irrelevant.
look this is like the one time in 8 years the NYT is encouraging people to do something beneficial, let's not "um actually" this one.
Oh I'm agreeing
Yeah, infant mortality rate was high, and zeroes really bring down the average
I find it interesting how the "graveyard of failures" also underpins how people buy into the successes touted by the wellness influencers. As long as we ignore those who didn't succeed, we will keep buying the illusion.
Don’t forget clean water and proper sewage, that’s added just as much as medicine. Yeah crazy.
It aligns with Psalm 90, which says it is a psalm written by Moses, and gives a good age as 'three score years and ten' i.e. 70. That was three and a half thousand years ago!
Life expectancy is indeed computed from birth to age at death. But the post you are commenting on is correct because HIGH child mortality has been addressed thru science — vaccines, clean water, adequate nutrition, antibiotics, health care.
Dead Kid Georg was an outlier and shouldn’t have been counted
lol no it was <60,
That's one thing I learned doing family genealogy; lots of men who lived into their 70s and later, some with two or three wives that they survived, and of their eight kids, maybe six lived to adulthood.
It could be even fewer than 6/8. You would have many children simply so SOME would survive to childhood. Some unlucky families would lose all their children after having many children. How can ANYONE look at this and want to go back? These people are insane. www.statista.com/statistics/1...
46% of children didn’t live to their fifth birthday and this is their fantasy of a ‘golden age’! WHAT THE HELL?
Yeah, I know there was one family unit I saw with about 15 kids, and only about 6 lived to adulthood, and there were three boys who all had been given the same name.
In fact, I have a great uncle on one side who died at 4 years old to scarlet fever, I think, in about 1913. And a great uncle on the other side who died by electrocution just before his first birthday in 1911. That was 1/4 and 1/6 in their respective families.
The food may have been organic and whole, but could you even get it? And was it spoiled when you did? Things like preservatives weren't invented to poison us. They were invented to make sure there was SOME food available.
that was my first thought - it was neither as plentiful, not as varied as today in many places and for many people. the way history is written, we all imagine the aristocratic classes and forget the majority of people struggled
And even the aristocrats had to deal with the seasons and the limits of food preservation at the time. Part of what drove the spice trade was that food wasn't always the best quality or in the best condition, not even for the rich.
I’ve noticed so-called superfoods (high in antioxidants, good sources of nutrients, some high fiber for those of us looking down the barrel of 60+) have been packaged in smaller volumes & jacked up in $. So this may put these foods further out of reach as they start to fleecing us.
The food additives thing he proposed recently has some merit but I also suspect may raise food costs. Ive noticed foods in the EU zone seem to taste better (or more like they did when i was younger) but Im not sure what it does for shelf life.
Exactly. They’ve raised the average lifespan by cutting down early death rates.
This is a massive pet peeve of mine. People not getting the difference between average life expectancy with and without infant mortality is huge. Our biggest medical advance have really been about keeping kids and mothers alive.
