Seeking Health

While most people instinctively know that living forever is likely to get pretty boring, most people want to enjoy a long life.

But how long is long? And how long is possible? I love life so much that I would eat a plateful of cardboard to spend another afternoon walking in the bush, another hour working in my garden, or another evening lying on the ground gazing up at the stars with my partner, Michael or our children. About to enter my sixth decade of life, I can hardly believe how young and healthy I feel. As long as I am functional, comfortable, and content, I want to live to be 120.

Aging is a normal part of life—a process that cannot be stopped or reversed; but age-associated diseases can be prevented and our functional lifespan can be prolonged. But for how long? The maximum human lifespan is believed to be about 125 years, but so far no one for certain has reached this limit. The oldest person of authentic record was a French woman who lived to be 122 years old.  The longest lived person in New Zealand was Maudie Wilson who lived to be 110 years old and died in October 2013. 

About 50 people alive today are over 110 years old —and there are presently 80,000 known centenarians (people who have reached 100 years).1 Interestingly, almost all of these “successful survivors” never saw a doctor until after age 90—obviously their exceptional longevity had nothing to do with medical intervention.

Life Expectancy Has Increased

The average life expectancy was 25 years or less during most (99.9%) of human existence. No prehistoric remains have been found of people older than 50 years. With few exceptions, war, accidents, starvation or infection ended lives before any of the signs of old age—graying of the hair, wrinkling of the skin, shortened memory, reduced strength, and decreased visual acuity—appeared. With the development of civilization people learned to control their environment and better protect themselves; with these advances some people then lived to a ripe old age. 

Do adults live longer today than they did in 1900?

We know that life expectancy has gone up tremendously. It was 47 in 1900. And today it’s 78. That’s 31 years. And people think that that’s because of modern medicine. But I come back to the question – are adults living longer than they did in 1900?

No. Not really. So how can that be? I just said that life expectancy went up 31 years. But let’s look at the data a little more carefully. If you were 65 in 1900, you could expect to live on average another 12 years, to age 77. That’s only one year less than life expectancy today. So, that means that adults today live little longer than they did in 1900. So what’s up with these figures?

The explanation is that the difference is seen in infant mortality. It used to be that 200 per thousand babies died in infancy, usually because of water-born illnesses, starvation, those type of issues. Today only 7 per thousand die. So that difference – those 193 babies in every thousand births that are now surviving to adulthood adds 31 years to the average lifespan. It’s not that people in 1900 were mostly dieing at 47 – a lot of people were dieing as infants and children and those that didn’t weren’t really living much less than we are today.

And most of the differences in lifespan are attributable to improvements in public hygiene, not medical advancements.

The History of Average Lifespans (in years)

Prehistoric 25

Classical Greece 28

Classical Rome 28

Medieval England 29

USA 1800 37

USA 1900 47

USA in 1950 68

USA in 2015 79

New Zealand in 2015 82

Japanese in 2015 84

All Adventists 85

Vegetarian Adventists 88.5

Conquer Chronic Diseases for the Next Big Boost

People living in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand eat a rich diet that shortens their life in many ways:

• Fat and cholesterol infiltrate their arteries, eventually causing ruptures and blockages (heart attacks and strokes).
• Inflammatory reactions scar the heart muscle and decrease its function.
• Food-borne environmental chemicals mutate the cells into cancer.
• Excess animal protein causes important loss of kidney function.

Even with all this disease from malnutrition, the average life span for the USA is 79.

Observing the health and longevity of people who eat better than most westerners provides clues to the potential gains from reducing chronic diseases. Japanese people who eat a diet based on plants (rice and vegetables) with little meat and no dairy products have an average lifespan of 84. But vegetarian Adventists do even better with women living, on average, to 90 years and men to 87 years. In fact, a direct comparison with other white Californians found vegetarian Adventists live an average of 10 years longer. However, these vigorous vegetarians still include way too much dairy, eggs, and vegetable oils in their diets to achieve the full potential of human longevity—leaving the opportunity to add a few more “good” years for people who are fully informed.

The November 2005 issue of National Geographic magazine carried an excellent article, “The Secrets of Living Longer.” They reported on 3 groups of long-lived people from Okinawa Japan, Sardinia Italy, and Loma Linda California—and all had in common that they followed a plant-based diet. At the very end of this issue there is a one-page “Do It Yourself” article with the subtitle, “Go Vegetarian.”