I’m Not Sure I Believe This
Baby boomers have more chronic illness and disability than their parents, as their sedentary habits and expanding girth offset the modern medicine that enables them to live longer … according to a study released yesterday in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Almost 40 percent of the boomers are obese, compared with 29 percent a generation ago. Fifty-two percent said they got no regular physical activity versus 17 percent of their parents, according to the study…
While fewer baby boomers were smoking or had emphysema than their parents’ generation, more had high blood pressure and high cholesterol and were taking medicines to treat those conditions, according to the study. Reinhard said the cholesterol finding may be skewed because doctors didn’t routinely test for cholesterol 20 years ago.
I am guessing my generation, when retired, will struggle from being obese and ADHD. It is as if living longer just gives us more time to become a hot mess.
I don’t think it’s true in the aggregate sense because I don’t think previous generations had healthier diets, for example, which contributes directly to cholesterol and obesity.
Baby boomers have more chronic illness and disability than their parents, as their sedentary habits and expanding girth offset the modern medicine that enables them to live longer…
Are Baby Boomers really less healthy? Or are we bigger whiners and feel more entitled than our parents? My father never called in sick. He didn’t stop working until he was dead.
I believe as long as society doesn’t become more proactive and educated about factors that affect their health — diet being at the forefront — and a paradigm shift in culture to a less-dependent society on health, then we future generations won’t deal with many issues when they retire. However, as we know, these ideals are too complex for society to understand apparently and in the future there will most likely be new health concerns that senior citizens will be dealing with.
“as their sedentary habits and expanding girth offset the modern medicine that enables them to live longer”
Looks like that new gym membership might just pay off!
I accept it at face value, but so what? It is a cost of post-industrial society. We could outlaw any technology invented since the end of World War 2, thereby getting more workers out of their office chairs and onto the factor floors and farm fields. Is that really what people want?
Plus, it is well known that restoring people to health, as we do today, does not reduce health costs. It just delays them. Think of the horrible injuries and deaths in factories and farms a few decades ago. Shame on anyone who thinks a little more overweight or hypertension is worse than that.
There is other work that disputes this.
A recent, very detailed, paper using data from NHANES predicts that the decline in smoking adds years to life-exoectancy and offsets any reduction in the growth of obesity which has, by the way, plateaued.
And then there’s the decline in disability which suggests that spending money on things like joint replacements does a lot to keep people active and shortens the period of disability before death.
I don’t actually see this as a bad thing. This just shows that people, overall, are living longer. 50 years ago, those same obese people would have died long before they reached the same age as today’s baby boomers. Since modern medicine is prolonging the life span of all – sick or healthy regardless – it follows that more older people are obese. This is simply because the obese are living long enough to be counted in the “older” population.