I once did a paper on caloric restriction with adequate nutrition (CRAN) for an undergraduate nutrition class. In the course of that paper, my research led me to examine the Okinawans and their lifestyle. They are among the longest lived persons on Earth (actually I believe they are the longest, but I want to leave myself some wiggle room on the point). In addition, they get lots of exercise, eat mostly fresh foods consiting largely of vegetables and fish. Furthermore, they are taught from childhood to never quite eat until they are full (thus they leave the table slightly hungry) which means they are practicing a natural caloric restiction of sorts. Finally, they typically don’t smoke and maintain strong family relationships. The thing is that even with all that I seem to remember that their average life span was around eighty two for females and seventy eight for men (I think in the US it’s around seventy three for males, and seventy eight for our better half). That’s not a huge difference for what amounts to some massive, positive lifestyle differences. It also leads to some interesting points to ponder:
If God “snapped her cosmic fingers” and gave everyone in the United States the Okinawan “lifestyle” what would be our leading causes of death (I think the leading cause of death in Okinawa is kidney failure, but am not at all certain)?
Would the overall economic impact of these ultimate “deaths” be less than or greater than the current situation especially as it relates to the medical industry? Consider that people would collect certain benefits like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid for a longer period of time. Furthermore, it is possible that “chronic kidney failure” that ultimately leads to death is more expensive than say heart disease or cancer to treat. For instance, I seem to recall a Romanian study from a few years ago that concluded that reducing the nations smoking rate would actually devastate their budget (because people would live longer, collecting more benefits). On the other hand people, living longer, heathier lives might generate more economic production. This is especially true with a reduction of morbidity and mortality in pre-retirement years.
The Okinawan Diet is often cited by proponents of caloric restriction because they say that it demonstrates how such a diet can extend life, and drastically reduce chronic disease. However, isn’t it also an illustration of the limitations of the practice? Certainly, if CR is as effective as it is in rats and other animals (often extending life spans by 50% or more) then it should yield more than an additional four years of life, especially when compared to the gluttons that we are in the United States.
My w.a.g. is that if we suffered from no other ailments, then we would all eventually die from some kind of cancer, which can be seen as essentially the result of a series of failures in gene replication. Enough errors, and eventually you get a wild cell. Given enough time, I think everyone would mount up enough of these errors.
I once read something written by a urologist that claimed that if you remove every other disease and extended life indefintely, given enough time all men would eventually develop prostarte cancer. FWIW.
I’m with ascenray - we’re on a planet being bombarded by radiation, in an atmosphere rich in a strong oxidizer. Don’t get enough sunlight, and you go vitamin-deficient and get depressed. Get too much, and you get melanoma. Downside: “Enough” for vitamin production on a short-term basis adds up to “too much” later on. That’s only some of the bad news.
The second bit of bad news is that we breathe oxygen. Our whole body is oxidizing, all the time. Think of it somewhere between rusting and burning up. Eventually, no matter how well made or maintained, the parts are going to wear out. Your body is constantly making new blood cells designed to carry this strong oxidizer to every nook and cranny in your body, including your brain.
Speaking of which: all those things that kill brain cells (drinking alcohol, accidentally inhaling a lungful of bus exhaust, getting chemotherapy, eating Twinkies rich in preservatives)? I guess they eventually catch up with you. The brain is in a long, slow glide slope toward the grave after it finishes configuring itself during your teens. If your CPU survives the initial burn-in, you can count on it for fifty more years of pretty smooth operation. After that? Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancers, and good old senility kick in.
And of course, your heart could just give up on you. Even if you don’t overpressurize the circulatory system or add drag with cholesterol, it’s just a muscle. It survives by catching electrical impulses, and I suspect your spark plugs wear out eventually.
The average age at death in the U.S. is 76.8, which I guess means that the average for men is about 73.8 and for women is about 79.8. The average age at death for Okinawa is 81.2, which I guess means that the average for men is about 78.2 and the average for women is about 84.2. So what this apparently means is that a good lifestyle will probably add about five years to your life. Is this really surprising? Did you think that you were going to live forever?
The death rate for cancer is lower, but not a huge amount lower, in Okinawa. The death rate for stroke is distinctly lower in Okinawa. The death rate for coronary heart disease is quite a bit lower in Okinawa. Still, these three things are the three major causes for death in Okinawa, just like in any first-world country. I think the fourth major cause of death in old age is respiratory diseases. If you take care of yourself, you will still die of the same causes. It will just take longer for them to happen to you.
Not in this day and age. Medical science is making leaps and bounds. If I exercise adn watch what I eat, don’t smoke and enjoy the benifts of a slowly increasing life expectancy, I increase my chances of being alive when some major breakthrough happens. Like growing new organs, uploading into a computer or a breakthrough in cryonics. All the unhealthy people dying of Arteriosclerosis, diabetes and the like at the age of 45-50 can be all smug with worms crawing through their body. Us healthy people have a greater chance of surviving to the next century.
Unhealthy people are going to feel stupid when some breakthrough happens but they cannot do the surgery because of their health. Or if the condition is too far advanced to cure.
Taken to the extreme, if you do everything right and avoid dying of disease or infirmity, you have only a violent death from an accident or murder to look forward to. 'Cuz nobody gets out of this world alive.
I think it is funny how one automatically assumes there is an “out.” Or that one should just live to eat what one wants, live like crap and die, instead of trying to live healthy and as long as possible. Why bother, you are going to die anyhow, just shoot yourself up with a bunch of heroin, I hear it is a far out experience. I mean, you are going to die anyhow, someday, somehow, even if it is billions of years from now when the universe either “runs out of energy” or collapses into itself, right, might as well end it now. Jump off that building. Why prolong the inevitable. Do it right now, you have no experiences, fun times or anything else to live for, nobody “gets out” of this world alive, right?
Thats ok, when you are 80 and have bone density problems, cant walk, cant hardly think straight because you ate too many McDonalds and didnt get enough exercise all your life, I will be happy in knowing that at least I can still run a marathon, still get around just fine, and still have not been hit by some statistical bus that is bound to happen sometime in the next 500 years, or whatever number “statistics” “proves” is going to happen eventually. Assuming that it doesn’t happen. I don’t plan on assuming it will either. And if it does, oh well, I at least tried.
Being both very healthy individuals, my grandparents both died without having any diseases in their mid 80’s both in different fashions.
My grandfather was a carpenter and his body just eventually gave out on him like it was worn out.
My grandmother then died a couple years later because her mind just kind of went. Almost like Alzheimers. Her mental functions just kept slowing and slowing and she’d sleep more and more every day. She eventually died in her sleep.
I don’t know if either of them had any official cause of death besides old age.
Epimethus, that post is just going to make it all the more ironic when you go out next week in a bizarre confrontation in which Smokey the Bear decides to stop fucking around and get serious about fire safety.
All organs eventually wear out. The lungs eventually lose elasticity over time, and break down. Or enough neurons die off and brain function is compromised. Or the prostate gets cancerous. Or the kidneys gradually lose their filtering ability.
No, how about on a more on topic note? I notice the OP has asked a rather straightforward question seeking a factual answer. That seems to be a good G.Q. topic. It seems to me that you’re starting to exercise some chip on your shoulder to tilt against straw windmills.
There was a thread a little while ago where we were playing around with what would happen if old age and disease stopped killing people. Assuming that crime was also not a problem, the current actuarial statistics suggest that you’d have about 10,000 years before you died in an accident (nothing was said about the variance of that figure, so it’s hard to say what the spread would look like).
Personally, I like Oliver Wendell Holmes’s take on it, which can be found in a number of places. I’m offering some college prof’s site at Walla Walla College (which I never knew existed before I went looking for a copy of this poem, lousy - or obsolete - coding - from someone in a CS department, no less!) and all, because it’s for an intro logic course, and it has some interesting content:
I mean, you are going to die anyhow, someday, somehow, even if it is billions of years from now when the universe either “runs out of energy” or collapses into itself, right, might as well end it now. Jump off that building. Why prolong the inevitable. Do it right now, you have no experiences, fun times or anything else to live for, nobody “gets out” of this world alive, right?