Life Expectancy Conundrum page 3

[john_e_turner_ii]

It's Cash! More money equals better food, housing, healthcare, clean water, comforts(less stress), safety, security, etc. An interesting study would compare the life expectancies of the 5-6 richest nations.

[Lewis]

Geography also determines longevity. In the late 1600s to early 1700s the life-expectancies for New England vs the Jamestown/Chesapeake Bay area were drastically different. A woman was likely to be married between 16 and 20 in both places- but in New England she may be married to the same man for 70 years. Further south, blended families were the norm because the wet, marshy warmth bred bugs and pestilance like nobody's business. If you made it to 45 around there, you were doing good. I remember a grave in Maine at a fishing village. He died at 50. She died at 90. Odds are pretty good that an accident killed him off given the local industry. The women in particular often lived into their 70s or 80s easily.

That's very interesting. Apparently Trappist monks tried to establish themselves on an old Indian mound at Cahokia in about 1805, but malaria got them:

Cahokia Mounds | Explore | Mounks Mound Mound 38


In England I understand till fairly recently people, and particularly incomers who weren't used to the area, were killed off by the marshy conditions in some parts of Essex -- not malaria just general dampness supposedly. Norman Lewis, the travel writer, had a bit on it in one of his books.

[jo]

Dr Kendrick who wrote 'The Great Cholesterol Con' says that migrants have higher levels of heart disease which he attributes to stress. He makes a convincing argument in his book. In countries with waves of migration such as the UK, US and Australia, immigration could be another factor in low life expectancy (as well as those already mentioned). And immigrants tend to go to cities where the jobs are so probably more stress and pollution.

[kenn]

Yeah, interesting to flick through the hymnbooks inside

I call BS on your 'contrarian fact' this time.

Population Distribution by Age, Race, Nativity, and Sex Ratio, 1860–2005 — Infoplease.com
1860, the population over 65 was 2.7%
2005 it was 12.4%
(a 5x increase!)

Yet somehow those statistics entirely reverse in the following 35 years? That would be..bizarre.

(Note, your reference is from the same bunch that says "...From a video segment recently aired on Nova [2007 population 306 million], we learn that only one in 10,000 Americans will live to age 100 [0.33% of the total population]..."
1/10,000 = 0.33%?)

I find NO record of any much-referred to U of VA study that "proves" this.

And from this:
http://paa2005.princeton.edu/downloa...issionId=50718
Quote:
According to our enhanced Medicare data, the centenarian population has grown in the 10-year period from 1/1/1990 to 1/1/2000 by 51 percent, or at an annual compound growth rate of 4.1 percent.
...which would certainly imply that the centenarian numbers haven't gone DOWN.

No, I'm going to suggest that the lack of written records in 1830 has more to do with the inflated reports of centenarians than nutrition.