Irrespective of the Peak Oil issue...Is life expectancy going to decline?

I see the trend in society to morbid obesity (at least in my local).

Medical and dental insurance and treatment is beyond affordability for many people.

The food supply is unhealthy and keeps degenerating with GMO foods, poisonous farm raised imported fish loaded with PCB's from China and Chile. As well as all the US or imported chemical laden factory made concoctions passed off as food.

On the news yesterday it said that 90% of the people tested had plasticizers in their urine.

Those are just a few things that I've brought up. Maybe you can add your own. But do you think that our life expectancy will go down in the near future from all our wrong living?

quote:

Originally posted by allenwrench:Snip...
But do you think that our life expectancy will go down in the near future from all our wrong living?

On average I am sure it will. That is one reason I moved out of the city when I retired so we can raise out own food.

As someone who.. out of my plans, got out of health care and into the food industry..

When I got into the business of preparing food for consumers.. at the first place I worked.. it literally made me not want to eat. So I lost weight. Subway.. is a lot healthier than my first experience.

But to answer your question.. we have got to stop eating/consuming so much. Heck,,, Consuming is what drives our economy.. so the news media wants to make you feel guilty about not consuming.. but laments us for being fat.

My opinion is this..Let's just start consuming less... Less food, less fast food, less oil... Let's start being more self reliant. Grow our own.. Even if you just have an upstairs apartment.. Try growing some herbs on your window seal.. or some lettuce..

If you want to stop dying.. you've got to start growing... your own stuff... My Granny lived to be 93 years old... and she lived most of her life on what was grown on her or her fatherh's land.

If you can just claim a 5 gallon bucket of earth... that is better than nothing.. That is my organic opinion. Now.. go to your local recycling center to get free 5 gallon buckets... or connect up with your cat loving friends to get those big buckets that cat litter comes in.. Those make fine containers to grow plants in..

My bet is no. Not any time soon anyway. Life expectancy is an average number. Even if people are not living as long at the end of their life, we save many more people at younger ages thanks to medical advances. My son would have died from his car accident if it had happened not too many years ago. My husband's father died of a heart attack 30 years ago at the age of 45. Today he would have probably lived, as his 15 years younger brother did. Just a thought.

Consuming less sounds good to me too. I have been doing that lately with my drastic change in life style.

Ellen

I think the question should be, Is the quality of our life in decline? There may be no change in life expectancy, but the health of Americans are declining. As stated by Tom Valentine, in the book, Sea Energy Agriculture,"The people of the United States are the best fed, chemically starved people in the world."

We might be living longer, but chronic diseases and cancers are on the rise in both children and adults.

Interesting question, and the loss of medical insurance strikes me as the key to the puzzle.

With medical "advances" we are prolonging our lives, but that just means we're staying sick longer. We don't really cure disease, we just manage symptoms.

On the other hand, my four-year-old nephews eat nothing that I would consider nutritious, have taken antibiotics and other prescription drugs routinely, and live in L.A., where the urban environment such as air quality is pretty awful. I wonder what their future health holds. Sometimes I think they'll be bulletproof in the toxic soup we live in...