Alex Howard @alexhoward75 - Twitter Profile

26 days ago

"We only get chronic disease now because we finally live long enough to." Nobody had grandparents until the invention of the ready meal, apparently. So here is the entire history of old people. Hunter-gatherer skeletons routinely show adults in their sixties and seventies. Once a forager cleared childhood, sixty-eight was a normal innings. Caspari and Lee found the proportion of older adults jumped sharply around thirty thousand years ago. Grandparents predate agriculture, writing and the wheel. Ramesses II died at about ninety, still on the throne. Sophocles was writing plays in his late eighties. Cato the Elder made eighty-five. Rome had a senate, which is named after the Latin for old man. Sparta was run by a council you could not join until you were sixty. Every tribe on earth put its decisions in the hands of its elders, which is a difficult system to operate without any. Eleanor of Aquitaine crossed the Pyrenees at seventy-seven to collect a bride for a king. Hobbes reached ninety-one. Newton eighty-four. Franklin eighty-four. John Adams ninety. Stradivari was still making violins at ninety-three. Hokusai signed his late work as the old man mad about painting, and he was eighty-eight. Life expectancy at birth was dragged down by infants, not by a missing category of pensioners. Now the part that finishes the argument. Every serious statistic on chronic disease is age-standardised. The epidemiologists already took the ageing population out. The rise is what was left after they did. Three hundred American soldiers killed in Korea were autopsied in 1953. Average age twenty-two. Seventy-seven per cent had visible coronary disease. Type 2 diabetes was called adult-onset until enough children got it to make the name awkward, so they changed the name rather than the food. Fatty liver now turns up in around one in ten children. Bowel cancer is climbing fastest in the under fifties, the one group that has gained nothing in longevity. The Tsimane reach eighty with the arteries of middle-aged Americans. They live long enough to get it and simply do not. Old people are not a modern invention. A nine-year-old with a fatty liver is.

SamaHoole's tweet photo. "We only get chronic disease now because we finally live long enough to."

Nobody had grandparents until the invention of the ready meal, apparently.

So here is the entire history of old people.

Hunter-gatherer skeletons routinely show adults in their sixties and seventies. Once a forager cleared childhood, sixty-eight was a normal innings.

Caspari and Lee found the proportion of older adults jumped sharply around thirty thousand years ago. Grandparents predate agriculture, writing and the wheel.

Ramesses II died at about ninety, still on the throne.

Sophocles was writing plays in his late eighties. Cato the Elder made eighty-five.

Rome had a senate, which is named after the Latin for old man. Sparta was run by a council you could not join until you were sixty.

Every tribe on earth put its decisions in the hands of its elders, which is a difficult system to operate without any.

Eleanor of Aquitaine crossed the Pyrenees at seventy-seven to collect a bride for a king.

Hobbes reached ninety-one. Newton eighty-four. Franklin eighty-four. John Adams ninety.

Stradivari was still making violins at ninety-three. Hokusai signed his late work as the old man mad about painting, and he was eighty-eight.

Life expectancy at birth was dragged down by infants, not by a missing category of pensioners.

Now the part that finishes the argument.

Every serious statistic on chronic disease is age-standardised. The epidemiologists already took the ageing population out. The rise is what was left after they did.

Three hundred American soldiers killed in Korea were autopsied in 1953. Average age twenty-two. Seventy-seven per cent had visible coronary disease.

Type 2 diabetes was called adult-onset until enough children got it to make the name awkward, so they changed the name rather than the food.

Fatty liver now turns up in around one in ten children.

Bowel cancer is climbing fastest in the under fifties, the one group that has gained nothing in longevity.

The Tsimane reach eighty with the arteries of middle-aged Americans. They live long enough to get it and simply do not.

Old people are not a modern invention. A nine-year-old with a fatty liver is.

20

777

167

108

19K

Alex Howard

@alexhoward75

Who to follow

Last Seen Users on Sotwe

Trends for you

Most Popular Users