What Is the Biggest Threat to Health?
Megan McArdle says it’s aging:
When a person with good habits and numbers has a random heart attack at age 60, people will be shocked and sympathetic, thinking it’s abnormal. When a fat person has a random heart attack at age 60, people will think it’s entirely the fat person’s fault. In reality, the fat person’s risk of heart attack is only slightly higher; most people think that his risk is drastically higher, and his heart attack will confirm the bias while a “healthy” person’s heart attack will be discounted as not fitting the pattern.
I definitely agree.
This is obvious.
The lower quality of food that we eat (which is loaded with preservatives, even toxins) over our lives could be a factor, but that hasn’t been proven and I don’t know that it could be.
The Economist published an article, “Worth all the Sweat,” that references how calorie-restriction diets prolong life, by reducing heart disease, cancer and other age-related degenerative diseases. According to the article, scientists have found that the benefits of exercise are about equal to calorie-restriction diets.
So I clicked the link, and it is a blog post that features a comment from a previous blog post. The information quoted here is in fact from that comment.
Uhh, okay, blog comments are our sources now?
While I appreciate the hubris for the author to speak for civilization with the use of the royal we, I would beg to differ. If I see someone drop dead of a heart attack at 60 who is skinny, I would call it genetics, which it likely would be.
If they were 85, then it was age, but at 60, I wouldn’t say that.
Even if I accept the unsourced blog comment author’s statistic that obesity provides only a slight increase of death from heart disease at age 60, I’m still pretty sure being fat is really bad for your health. You know when you see those 100 year olds on TV with Willard Scott? How many of them are fat? You don’t see a lot of obese old people walking around out there do you? I don’t think it is a coincidence.
Isn’t it standard practice to note advanced age as a clinical diagnosis?
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I partly don’t agree with the above saying as obesity is not only an important risk factor for cardiovascular complications but is also responsible for various debilitating diseases. With current trend of lifestyle, individuals are susceptible to experience heart attack at the age of 50 and only people’s view towards health can make any difference.
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