There is no question that our parents and grandparents (depending on your age) are living longer and longer. But I have serious doubts about all that talk that the world will be populated by old people in, say, 50 years.
Sometimes I feel my generation will not live as long as the previous ones (for you to understand what generations I’m talking about, I’m 29 years old).
My parents, who are around 53 today, were lean, active and healthy until their mid forties. Far leaner and more active than I am now.
My friends started getting fat and bald, with high blood pressure and dangerous cholesterol levels by the end of their twenties. My parents in law, on the other hand, are close to 70 now, and they started putting on weight much later than us.
My mother had three kids and continued to be thin and strong for years after that. I have to pay attention to what I eat and to my back aches today – and I haven’t had a single kid yet!
In other words, my generation looks (and feels) today the same way our parents look and feel – today!
We are precociously old even before getting old. I don’t even want to think of what will happen when we get really old (I mean, if we do).
This is Baby Thelma , a circus fat lady famous on the fiftes (or forties, I’m not sure). Only 60 years ago people would go to a show and pay the ticket to see her. Today we see people like her on the street all the time.
Totally anecdotally our parents generation seems incredibly healthy compared to our grandparents- I know 70 year olds who practice ballet every day and make me feel old- was it HRT and aerobics? Agree that obesity/ diabetes look like they’ll have a devastating effect on our and the next generation. It looks like baby Thelma is surrounded by a troupe of baby Thelma’s.
Another anecdotal observation about our parent’s generation (which feels a bit strange to write, as from your post, Barbara, I am your parent’s generation. But I don’t feel it!), they don’t take any notice of sell-by dates. Any house I have been to where the inhabitants are 70-plus, the fridge is replete with old yougurts, milk, cheese, bacon etc – all being eaten with aplomb and no obvious negative side effects. As I live in the UK, I put it down to an attitude from the days of WW2 and rationing in the almost 10 years that followed, but that’s a speculation.
Maxine, I love the example! Your speculation about the WW2 makes sense to me.
(I once told a phamaceutical friend that all sell-by dates, of foods or medicines, have a safety buffer, being shorter then necessary to avoid problems! You can imagine she got mad at me – with good reason. But anecdotal evidence has so far proven my point is not so wrong).
And about the fact you don’t feel like my you are from my parents’ generation: that’s because your generation is (generalizing) healthier than mine! :)
I’ve been thinking about this and wondering whether there is any evidence beyond the purely anecdotal.
However, I think it’s well known that people now living who grew up during World War II might be especially healthy because of (1) selection against unhealthy members of the same cohort, early in life (through diseases such as diphtheria, pertussis, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis and so on), so that only the tough ones survived. This will tend to magnify the apparent health of any generation older than yours; (2) the fact that they ate less than we do, particularly red meat, processed foods and sugar, and probably ate more unprocessed foods such as fruit and vegetables as a proportion of their diet, and (3) as children they played outdoors and were exposed to a lot of allergens from which today’s children are protected.
Now, for the anecdotal part. When that same generation grew up and had children (us), the fashion was for scrupulous, practically radiogenic hygiene. I have a feeling that this tendency – an understandable reaction to earlier poverty and squalor – might have compromised our own health in certain ways, by reducing the capacity of our immune system to respond to various threats. For example, I had eczema quite badly as a baby, and spent a lot of time being bathed and smeared in gunk. When my own daughter had infantile eczema, we first bathed her every day in gunk, until we realized that this wasn’t having much effect. We then decided to bathe her only once a week – and the relief from eczema was immediate. My mother, however, was horrified.
It’s only my mind that doesn’t feel old, ancient anc creaky, Barbara, not the rest of me – and I am not too sure about my mind, sometimes ;-)
Mrs Gee and I have lately returned from a lunch-hour shopping trip to the town of Sheringham, where we had to buy a can of teak oil and some dead mice. Sheringham is the world headquarters of STOP, the Society of Tiresome and Obstructive Pedestrians (Over-60’s Division), and whenever we go there we feel we’ve reduced the average age to 216. Like The Who, I want to die before I get old, and I have instructed Mrs Gee that if I ever show signs of wanting a mobility scooter she should let me buy one, and then, once bought, glue the pedal to the metal and point me towards the end of Cromer Pier.
The hoarding’s an interesting idea- I thought at first it didn’t work this side of the pond, but the Depression had a profound effect on the generation that lived through it and thereby the next. But the people I’m thinking abotu eat soy, mainline green tea- so hard to tell what’s what.
STOP- I love it! Dead mice?
I think the effect is absolutely real, the present generation will have a lower life expectancy then their parents with poorer health and reduced fecundity. This is occurring in spite of the advances in medical care. This exactly relates to my work on basal nitric oxide.
NO is a signaling molecule in hundred or thousands of pathways. Each NO “sensor” only senses the sum of NO from all sources and removed by all sinks. An important component of that NO is the basal level. There are no barriers to NO diffusion, so all NO pathways are “coupled”, that is they are all related and in a very real sense the basal level of NO is what regulates the diverse metabolic pathways to be “in sync”. “Stress” is a low NO state, NO must be lowered under conditions of “fight or flight” to disinhibit cytochrome c oxidase and allow for maximum consumption of O2 and maximum generation of ATP via oxidative phosphorylation. Low NO is the signal that communicates a state of “stress” to all of physiology. All diseases exacerbated by stress are diseases of low NO (and vice versa).
The basal NO level is ~1 nM/L or less. There are no techniques to measure that in vivo at the length (sub-micron) and time scales (sub-second) that are important. With no techniques to measure it, it is easily dismissed as “unimportant”.
How that relates to obesity is through mitochondria biogenesis. NO is what triggers mitochondrial biogenesis. With fewer mitochondria, more ATP is generated via glycolysis, but glycolysis takes 19x more glucose to generate ATP than does oxidative phosphorylation. 5% less ATP from mitochondria means that the vasculature must deliver twice as much glucose. The only way that twice as much glucose can be delivered is by increasing the concentration in bulk blood (the hyperglycemia of the metabolic syndrome). It is also necessary to increase fluid flow throught the extravascular space (hypertension and edema).
The glucose level that “matters”, isn’t the value in bulk blood (where it is easily measured), but in the extravascular tissues adjacent to each cell where that cell takes the glucose up (through GLUT active transporters inducible by insulin). The level next to the cell is lower than in bulk blood because intervening cells have consumed glucose and insulin. Hyperglycemia and insulin resistance are adaptive mechanisms to increase glucose delivery to the cells “too far” from a capillary.
When ATP is made by glycolysis, lactate is produced. Lactate can be turned back into glucose by the liver, kidneys and skin (a little), but that takes mitochondria to consume the reducing equivalents. If there are not enough mitochondria to consume those reducing equivalents (or something to use them on), what is physiology to do? I think, turn it into lipid. First in adipocytes, then in the liver, then in muscle, then in kidneys and the heart. When the peripheral tissues such as the heart and kidneys start making ectopic lipid, you are at death’s door.
This is (my hypothesis of) how morbid obesity occurs. Cells too far from a capillary don’t have enough ATP, so they are “starving”. They send “starvation signals” to the brain, which compels the consumption of carbohydrate (to get glucose to those cells). The lactate has to be gotten rid of by turning it into fat.
The solution to all of this is to increase the basal NO level and so increase basal mitochondria biogenesis and shift ATP generation back to oxidative phosphorylation and away from glycolysis.
This explanation is counter to the existing (and wrong) paradigms of glucose homeostasis and of obesity due to the lack of will power by “teh fatties”. It is considered an “extraordinary” hypothesis because it is counter to existing paradigms (which are in fact wrong and not consistent with the data in the literature which this hypothesis is consistent with). As an “extraordinary” hypothesis, it requires “extraordinary” data which requires “extraordinary” research which requires “extraordinary” funding which requires “extraordinary” evidence to justify.
HG, the bathing once a week is what did it. One of the normal commensal bacteria are the autotrophic ammonia oxidizing bacteria which are abundant in dirt. They are not recognized as commensals because they are obligate autotrophs and so are unculturable on any media used to isolate pathogens. They are also slow growing with optimum doubling times of ~10 hours.
They produce NO/NOx from the ammonia in sweat. This NO/NOx inhibits NFkB which turns down the “gain” of the immune system. These bacteria are the agent of the hygiene hypothesis. With a good biofilm of them, the NO/NOx they produce suppresses all the heterotrophic bacteria that cause body odor.
On the other hand, my grandfather got plenty of exercise, only they called it work, of the back-breaking cotton-farmer sort that makes you old while you’re still young. He died of a stroke at 72 looking like he was in his 90s. But he was thin, almost no fat on his body.
On the other other hand, my grandfather’s brother lived to 104 and was healthy almost to the day he died. He was a watermelon farmer. I wonder if that had anything to do with it.