Life Expectancy Improvement

Life expectancy by year from 1900 to 2000 in the US had the following changes.
From 1900 to 1920 life expectancy went from 47 to 54.
From 1918 to 1921 life expectancy went from 39 to 60
WW1 and Spanish flu had a lot of youthful deaths that drove down the average age of death in 1918. But the trend was actually going from 47 to 60.

There were far fewer children dying before the age of five and there was reduced disease impacts from improving sanitation and the introduction of the first vaccines.

Those who are motivated can follow intermittent fasting, KETO and low-carb diets.

US Life expectancy increased 2 years from 2000 to 2020 (76.5 to 78.5).

Life Expectancy increased 4.5 years from 2000 to 2020 (80.5 to 84.9) in Hong Kong.

About 400 million people (mostly Japan, Spain, Italy) have life expectancy over 83 or 84.

Today, Asian Americans live the longest (87.1 years), followed by Latinos (83.3 years), whites (78.9 years), Native Americans (76.9 years), and African Americans (75.4 years).

Part of the longevity of Asian American and Hispanic Americans is education, lifestyle and socioeconomic factors.

People can now afford genetic screening to know if they need to modify their lifestyle or get medical treatment because of life-shortening genetic vulnerability.

25 thoughts on “Life Expectancy Improvement”

  1. You have the wrong topic. I am talking about East Asians in the US, not in East Asia.
    And the main reason there is no association between supplementation and life expectancy is that lots of drinkers and smokers take supplements: “Other differences were also evident; prevalence of use was higher among those who were former smokers (61% vs. 39%),…or who typically consumed a moderate amount of alcohol (1 drink/day; 63% vs. 35%) compared to their counterparts.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6116059/
    Also, people with illnesses often take supplements hoping that will cure or treat them, or reduce symptoms. Cancer patients in particular.
    “Furthermore, Asians (42%) were more likely to care for an older relative than Hispanics (34%), Blacks (28%), or Whites (19%).” https://www.aarp.org/home-garden/livable-communities/info-2005/fs119_ltc.html
    Auto accident fatalities:Hispanic 12.27/100,000, White 12.50/100,000, African-American 12.31/100,000, Asian 4.00/100,000 (their terms) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/810995
    Only 115/100,000 Asians are incarcerated while 450/100,000 Whites are. If this doesn’t say something about violent and reckless behavior, I don’t know what would: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/raceinc.html
    I was wrong about steroid use. Asian Americans use them about twice as much as European Americans and half as much as African Americans.
    And you completely invented all this “backward Asian” straw man hooey. Root soup?

  2. Lots of people were dying of heart disease in 1900: 137.4/100,000. 192.9/100,000 in 2010. When you consider that deaths by flu and pneumonia that also disproportionately kills the elderly and killed far more back then 202.2/100,000 compared to now 16.2/100,000, it is clear that many more would have been killed by heart disease if flu and pneumonia had not got them first. We also now know that low level lead contributes to heart disease to the tune of 256,000 deaths a year or 78/100,000 They were not inundated by lead in the exhaust of cars: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180312201739.htm 
    If they had been you can add 78 to 137 yielding 215/100,000, which is marginally higher than ours. And that of course is without considering all those flu and pneumonia deaths killing them before they can die of heart disease. Though, they may well have had lead levels equal or higher than ours from other sources like cans.
    Reported cancer rates were lower, but there was a stigma attached to “the cancer” at the time, which certainly contributed to under reporting. Also, they would not have recognized some forms of cancer like leukemia. They mostly went by obvious tumors bulging. Also, many cancers are caused by viral pathogens. These probably took time to spread all over the world. Though clearly we had and have many chemicals in our environment that contribute to higher cancer levels. That is hardly a lifestyle choice though. That is big corporations making a profit.

  3. And you are way wrong about social ties. Rural people in 1900 had very little social interaction. They were isolated by the physical spaces. They were lucky if they got to church once a week. The only time you were likely to see relatives that moved more than 20 miles away was if there was a funeral. Most people could not even get mail until 1896. If there was a local newspaper it was only delivered in town. All over the US child abuse and violence against women was rampant.
    The main impetus for the prohibition of alcohol was that having the weekend off men would use the free time to get drunk and beat their family…mostly because they did not like their lives…their lives being so full of hard monotonous work. Women were tired of being beaten up. The movement started well back in the 1800’s.
    It wasn’t until sports really took off that there was an alternative to going to the saloon.
    Your mythology glamoring the past is irrational and not based in fact.

  4. You are the one playing games. You said lifespan is going down because of lifestyle changes and later described those changes “no processed food, stronger family and social ties, more time exposed to the sun, more physical activity, nobody is fat, wearing glasses and everybody has the right posture and radiate more vitality”.
    Then when I point out that people are dying of overdoses of painkillers and committing suicide, you claim to be right just because those things can be shoehorned into “lifestyle” by simpletons. No, they are not taking opiates as a lifestyle choice, most were prescribed to them by doctors getting kickbacks from greedy corporations and were addicted. The suicide problem comes from the erosion of jobs in the Midwest, as manufacturing has become more automated or moved offshore. And knowing you are deriving your livelihood from things that kill people like tobacco and coal can’t help either. They have been mining coal and growing tobacco for a long time. That lifestyle has not changed, just the social approval of that has changed.

  5. The prevalence of both poor health and low mental health life threatening diseases is increasing in leaps and bounds for every age group. Modern medicine is not dealing with the causes of this increase. Consequently life expectancy is on a decrease. Obviously modern medicine practitioners cannot even accept this grim reality.

  6. There’s a lot of nonsense here to unwrap. Violent deaths are a lower fraction of adult deaths in the US than in Asia, so “fighting and extreme sports” are definitely out. Smoking and diabetes are dramatically more prevalent in E. Asia than in the US. Preventative healthcare is an enormous delineater of positive versus negative health outcomes, and nursing home care often comes with preventative healthcare. Countries with any form of senior care typically have higher life expectancy than those without. The biggest reason to criticize nursing homes is quality versus quantity of life and years spent in invalidity vs. years spent in validity. There’s no link between vitamin supplementation and life extension, particularly things like horny goat weed and ginko biloba. The interesting thing about ‘developing’ countries versus developed is that they’re on the upward swing of conversion to convenience foods high in salt, saturated fat and sugar versus developed countries which — while consuming high levels — are on the downswing because of health research pushback. This notion that E. Asia is still in the 18th century is… a lot of words come to mind, backwards, inaccurate, silly are about the most polite versions. Cities of 25 million+ grow on trees in E. Asia and they’re just as modernized with respect to convenience food as the west. This notion that E. Asia is all 100 year old grandmothers serving root soup in mud huts is…

  7. I believe you’re misreading the heart disease/cancer data from the early 20c. It’s not that no one was dying of those things, it’s that generally people were dying of other things first because the statistical distribution of “the age at which heart failure and cancer become dominant causes of death” is situated about a higher age group than some other causes of death that were endemic to the early 20c; i.e., pneumonia, TB, etc. The preponderance of lifestyle-related heart disease was already on the rise in 1900 in industrialized nations because 10s of millions of people were already converting to a sedentary, post-scarcity industrial lifestyle but these results are quite regionally dependent. Industrialization didn’t reach every corner of the world at the same time, but it had reached the United States and western Europe by 1900.

  8. Of course life was not perfect in the 1900s, but as is commonly accepted and shown above, with very little sugar and a lot of fresh vegetables and fruits and solely home cooking diet diet had to be better. People did not eat canned food. Check the 1900 movie of how people looked, this is the best proof. The biggest causes of death did not include heart disease, as simple as that. You are trying to build a false story out of anecdotes. You are protecting modern medicine with lies because you are invested in it. Even as we areget better in curing modern life threatening disease life expectancy is getting shorted just because more people are contracting them as our life conditions increases the likelihood of contracting them . One of the things that studies should be made on. Maybe in practicing medicine you were never asked for, but you need to start using your common sense.

  9. Here’s an actual study of the health of Victorian Britain (using adult height as a proxy), based on the records of WWI servicemen who were born in the 1890s. They identified a number of factors, including female illiteracy rates, overcrowding and number of siblings. And identify a disparity between urban and rural (who have better access to fresh food) dwellers.
    http://ftp.iza.org/dp8128.pdf

  10. Because of the economic shutdowns – dubiously blamed on the Corona virus, as if the CV was a world politician with an economics degree – famine and poverty is rapidly undoing decades of progress, which will have an significant effect on the statistics if it lasts. The U.N. says India alone will be set back 15 years.

  11. And the canned food they bought had lead alloy solder. In fact, lead alloy soldered cans were not fully banned until 1995 in the US.

  12. 19th century is the 1800s. Did you read the 1908 thing?
    You may not have gone to the store often but you went. You bought flour, cornmeal, lard, salt, sugar, baking powder, oats, other dry goods, canned goods, and spices. Maybe some fruit for pies. Canned milk, if you did not have a cow or a deal with a neighbor who did. You have vegetables that you grew. Maybe you preserved some in jars in the cellar. Tomatoes were often jarred. You may make your own jelly or jam sealed with wax. All the women made pies. Lard, flour, sugar, salt, some fruit. They made bread at least once a week. Rolls maybe 2 or 3 times. No fish unless you lived very close to the coast or a river/lake with fish.
    According to what we know about nutrition, they were not eating healthy. Limited variety often bordering on malnutrition because of seasonality of food and limited transportation. Their IQs were low (low iodine, little omega 3, no prenatal vit). They were short (unless their parents were rich). And they died young even when it was not from a contagious disease. And the diseases they caught often did enduring damage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheumatic_fever
    We are generally too healthy to have the same reactions. We just get strep throat for a week and done. Contrast that with WWI. The third most common reason they had to give people a medical discharge was this heart damage: http://www.kumc.edu/wwi/index-of-essays/heart-disease.html
    Unless you got ample iron, hookworm rendered you immobile.

  13. The year to year deaths from the flu are fairly random. Some strains will just be more deadly than others and the vaccines may or may not be a good fit for that year. I would expect less to die this year because of the extraordinary measures in place to impede Coronavirus.
    If we find a cure for Adenovirus 5, 36 and 37, then much less people will become obese. That may not do a lot for those already obese…it may.
    Everyone is eager to blame the obese, but I think this is just another case of people bashing. The reality is that more and more people are following nutrition advise even as obesity increases. Cola consumption is way down: https://www.statista.com/statistics/306836/us-per-capita-consumption-of-soft-drinks/ Seafood consumption has doubled. Chicken consumption has tripled. And beef is down from around 90 lb per person to about 60 lb with chicken way ahead. Red meat was at 75% of meat consumption in 1970 but is now down to 50%.
    https://aei.ag/2018/02/19/wheres-meat-u-s-meat-consumption-continues-higher/
    One can’t deny physics. We eat more, but the reason is lower self control from lead exposure and the adenoviruses.
    So, no I don’t accept your claim, because I think there is evidence that there are more diseases shortening lives than is generally accepted. I think there are pathogens involved with several mental illnesses, obesity, diabetes, and more cancers than currently recognized. Alzheimer’s and other diseases may be part genetics and part pathogen caused.

  14. I think East Asian life expectancy advantage in the US is due to the following:
    1.Diet. Eating more fresh vegetables, and boiling and steaming food more.
    2.Family taking care of the elderly, rather than placing them in nursing homes. I think you are more likely to die more quickly in a nursing home: lots of canned food rather than fresh. They generally make traditional Midwest food with the cheapest ingredients they can find that satisfy a dietitian and can be eaten by someone without teeth. Residents are not going to get a nice salmon diner, and if they get something called “salmon”, it will be some other fish. With those limitations there will be limited variety and poor nutrition. They probably will not get much sunlight. And there may not be much quiet at night.
    3.European American boys mostly do all manner of stupid things with accumulated consequences. They may take steroids, play sports more aggressively than makes sense, use drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, fight, do extreme sports, get in auto accidents…and get and give venereal diseases for their efforts. East Asians generally avoid these things to a larger degree.
    4.East Asians are more eager to take supplements, and pursue having a long life. European Americans pursue BBQ, Rocky Road and salads with a mountain of ranch dressing and croutons.

  15. From your second link:
    “In 1900, the top 3 causes of death were infectious diseases—pneumonia and flu, tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal infections (a fourth infectious disease, diphtheria, was the 10th leading cause of death). Improvements in sanitation, public health (vaccination development and delivery), and medical treatments, such as antibiotics, led to dramatic declines in deaths from infectious diseases during the 20th century. As the impact of these diseases has been reduced or eliminated, mortality rates from other causes, especially chronic diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, have increased, and new diseases, such as noninfectious airways diseases, diabetes, and suicide, are now among the top 10 causes of death. ”

    “Genetic variations don’t explain why mortality rates double as you cross Boston Harbor from Back Bay to Charlestown or walk up Fifth Avenue from midtown Manhattan into Harlem…. Disparities in health and disease are outcomes that are contingent on the ways society structures the lives and risks of individuals.”

    So People in 1900 were not dying from heart disease and cancer. Most of the food was fresher, processed at home and contained less preservatives processed sugars and salt. You are rotten enough to base you arguments on false claims

  16. The prevalence of many life shortening disease is going up, and even if they are cured more often overall that does not add to life expectancy. I know that death from flu was increasing even before Covid 19 and that probably has a lot to do with overall weakening of the immune system and there are other reasons for shortening of life expectancy. It is not possible to separate the mental health element in shortening of life expectancy. A wider understanding that modern medicine, bounded by the materialistic scientific dogma seldom applies. You don’t have to resort to metaphysics to realize that there is a vibration of disease that can affect the whole population as much as there is a vibration of health.

    Check this one also:
    “In last year’s report, the CDC highlighted three things that have contributed to America’s shrinking life expectancy in recent years: drug overdoses, chronic liver disease, and suicide. Suicide makes the list yet again this year, as do Alzheimer’s disease and “unintentional injuries,” a category which includes drug overdoses. Combined, these three causes of death make a considerable contribution to our collective decline in longevity.”

    So shorter life expectancy is not only about people hurting themselves which in itself is not exclusive and depends on other societal health parameters.
    https://www.popsci.com/life-expectancy-declining/#:~:text=Now%20our%20progress%20has%20slowed%20and%20begun%20to%20move%20the%20other%20way.&text=In%20last%20year's%20r

  17. There were plenty of processed foods in 1900: Cheese, oil, butter, bread, bacon, ham, sausage, olives, pickles, flour, lard, anything canned, dried, smoked, fermented or salted. Cooking is processing, mixing, whipping, churning and aging are also processing. I believe the best measure of processing is the amount of AGEs, and acrylamide in food. All processing is not equal. Boiling, steaming, stewing, cooking using more acidic sauces or marinades tends to be better: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3704564/
    And the people who did not die of diseases and accidents often succumbed to heart disease, cancer and stroke and younger than we do generally. https://www.ncdemography.org/2014/06/16/mortality-and-cause-of-death-1900-v-2010/

  18. Opioid deaths skyrocketed from 2012 when there were 23,000 deaths to 47,000. And it had been rising since at least 1999 when it was 8,000. https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/opioid-overdose-deaths-by-age-group/?dataView=0&activeTab=graph&currentTimeframe=0&startTimeframe=19&selectedDistributions=total&selectedRows=%7B%22wrapups%22:%7B%22united-states%22:%7B%7D%7D%7D&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
    And the number of suicides has been climbing as well. It was about 30,000 in 2000 but 48,000 in 2018. Some of that overlaps with overdoses. Alcohol related deaths have also doubled since 1999: “A new study finds that the number of alcohol-related deaths per year among people ages 16 and older doubled from 35,914 to 72,558 between 1999 and 2017”: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/alcohol-related-deaths-double-in-two-decades#Many-deaths-caused-by-liver-disease-or-overdose

  19. You might want to read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair for a look at the food industry in 1900.

  20. Life expectancy in the US has been going down in the last five years as shown in the CDC report below as our life style is getting unhealthier and the progress in medicine is geared toward specific biochemical reactions and is not catching up any longer.

    Check also the 1900 footage below it from around the world from a time when people were having a much healthier life style, no processed food, stronger family and social ties, more time exposed to the sun, more physical activity, nobody is fat, wearing glasses and everybody has the right posture and radiate more vitality, we need to restore that first if we care about health and life expectancy within the framework of the 21st century and the advancement we have made in public health care! The tiny tidy details that modern medicine got lost at do not go down to the fundamentals and will not be able to restore that!

    https://www.aafp.org/news/health-of-the-public/20181210lifeexpectdrop.html#:~:text=Data%20from%20the%20brief%20and,to%20the%20current%2078.6%20years.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHqha40xRL4

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