We live longer today than in our great grandparent’s time, right? With all the advances in medical science we’ve gone from dying at like 35 to living into our 70s. At one point I believed this too.
I hear this from people when they ask me how I lost so much weight. As soon as I say Atkins they say, oh I couldn’t do that, I’d have a heart attack. That soon leads to a conversation on real food vs. packaged food and the history of real food. Then the person comes up with life expectancy as the basis for their belief that Atkins/Paleo/etc is bad for you. Yeah, about that. Turns out it’s not true. People lived to ripe old ages in the 1200s. I’ve traced my own lineage back to 400AD and even then I had relatives living into their 70s routinely. Infant mortality is the big change over time and is the metric that is considerably improved. Average age, not so much. For more information on the fallacy of life expectancy, go here. It’s a blog about nutrition but has some links to more information in the post.
Remember the old saying, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.