Today's Middle-Aged in Worse Health Than Ancestors

[rangerrebew]

Today's Middle-Aged in Worse Health Than Ancestors

50-somethings will face more challenges as retirement nears, study suggests

By Alan Mozes

 

FRIDAY, Oct. 6, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- As Americans in their 50s move toward retirement age, many are in worse overall health than their peers in prior generations, researchers warn.

"We found that younger cohorts are facing more burdensome health issues, even as they have to wait until an older age to retire, so they will have to do so in poorer health," said study author Robert Schoeni. He's an economist and demographer at the University of Michigan.

http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20171006/todays-middle-aged-in-worse-health-than-ancestors

[Free Vulcan]

These are the younger boomers and older gen xers. Let's face it, many of use have lived hard lives. Going like bat out of hell for decades, lots of adult and illicit substances, eat like crap, lots of adrenaline and stress, with a good dash of STD's has finally caught up, as it always does at 50.

I'm glad I lived clean, ate well, and got plenty of exercise in my youth. It is paying off now.

[Applewood]

These are the younger boomers and older gen xers. Let's face it, many of use have lived hard lives. Going like bat out of hell for decades, lots of adult and illicit substances, eat like crap, lots of adrenaline and stress, with a good dash of STD's has finally caught up, as it always does at 50.

I'm glad I lived clean, ate well, and got plenty of exercise in my youth. It is paying off now.

Then there was my paternal grandmother.  She ate all the "wrong" food.  No fruit, no vegetables except onions for cooking and apples and cherries for struedel.  She ate potatoes --potato pancakes and potato chips,.  Fatty fried meats -- she even ate the fat around a steak or other kind of beef.   She loved candy, cake, pies and cookies too.

She lived to age 90.

I don't know. Maybe it was because her generation worked harder.  The men did  a lot of physical labor. Women lIke her didn't have the labor saving devices we have now.   An automatic washer?  Grandma had an old scrubboard and a bucket of water.  No automatic dryer either.  The clothes dried in a clothesline outside.  She later had a wringer washer, which still required her to put the clothes in, run them through the wringer and rinse them in tubs of water.  She scrubbed floors on her hands and knees. She used a broom and dustpan as her vacuum cleaner.  There was nothing easy in being a homemaker back in her day.

Or maybe it was because she was a stubborn,  tough, ornery German.   Her last illness was a massive stroke. Doctors gave her a week or two to live, at the most. She lasted six months. The joke in our family was that when God called her, she put Him on hold.  She wasn't going to leave us till she was darn good and ready.

[Neverdul]

Could it also be because people who would have died earlier in life or even never made it out of infancy or childhood, are living long enough that their bad genes finally catch up with them?

OTOH, I note that the article says; “They found that a higher percentage of Americans now in their 50s rated their own health as just fair or poor, compared with what older Americans said about their own health at a similar age.”

Perhaps folks who rate their own health tend to skew toward being hypochondriacs?