Are people really living longer?

Are you doubtful that people live longer?

As compared to what? You give no dates to accompany your estimates.

Median age in 1350 England was about 24, but they had just had a plague..

Yes, unfortunately the suffering is being drawn out longer!

I saw a statistic somewhere (I’ll have to look for it) that stated the millennial generation is the first to have sorter life spans than the previous generation.
The main reason they gave was the rise in obesity rates and all its associated difficulties.

Found it. New York Times March 17 2005

“BOSTON, March 16 – For the first time in two centuries, the current generation of children in America may have shorter life expectancies than their parents, according to a new report, which contends that the rapid rise in childhood obesity, if left unchecked, could shorten life spans by as much as five years.

The report, to be published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, says the prevalence and severity of obesity is so great, especially in children, that the associated diseases and complications—Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, cancer—are likely to strike people at younger and younger ages.”

My memory is not so bad.

Thanks for the article @LuckyGuy. I shared it on fb.

I’m presuming, since you did not add sufficient detail to the question, that you’re asking us to discuss “average lifespan [not ‘age’] for American men and women”, and not “all men and women in the world”.

And it is actually heart disease, not breast cancer – or all cancers combined – that is the leading cause of premature death among mature women in the USA. But that’s beside the point.

“Average” lifespan depends upon many things, including the handling of child-bearing women during pregnancy and delivery, which have always been elevators of risk among female populations, and improvement in treating childhood disease and causes of infant mortality, which have been problems for both sexes. When infant mortality statistics improve with the survival of more and more newborns, and as childhood infectious disease (and accidental) deaths are prevented, then the “average lifespan” for the population can increase pretty dramatically, even if the oldest people in the society don’t live longer, and in fact, even if they don’t live as long as they used to.

In addition to that, “average” lifespan is a number that is arrived at by simply adding up all of the ages of the people whose lives have already ended by a certain point and then dividing by the number of people whose lifespans went into that calculation. It’s a certain “measure of central tendency”, but it’s not the only one, and not always the best one. The other common measures are “median” (what is the age of the person in the exact center of a list of “all people in the population who have already died) and “mode” (what is the most common age of death of the population in question). (There are other measures of “central tendency”, but I’m sure that I’ve lost most readers already.)

And all of this is completely different from predictions of potential lifespans for people who are already alive, which depend on how old they already are, and then makes predictions for how much longer they might still be shuffling around in this mortal coil.

So it’s important to know what measures you’re looking at. The actuarial tables for a person of my age, for example, may predict that I could expect to live longer than “average” ... because I have already lived so much of that average. That is, I am no longer a candidate for “infant mortality” or “childhood illness”, and I never was a candidate for the complications of pregnancy or childbirth.

But I suspect that you don’t care about this kind of nuance in a response, and it’s all must pedantry to you. Mostly, I find myself writing to @LuckyGuy with replies such as this, so I hope he enjoys it.

@CWOTUS I do enjoy it.
I figure a peer reviewed paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine has already factored in many of the effects you mentioned. The telling sentence is critical
“For the first time in two centuries, the current generation of children in America may have shorter life expectancies than their parents, according to a new report, which contends that the rapid rise in childhood obesity, if left unchecked, could shorten life spans by as much as five years.”

That paper was from 2005. A quick search shows similar results from newer studies 2012, 2013, and others.
Medicines, diagnostics, and medical techniques get better but we counteract the improvement by getting bigger. The data is easy to find. We may not like what is says but the data is there.

@Seek Your question is a good one: “As compared to what?” Just the thing I want to know! I follow what the odds say, and have stated them here. But my doctors and dentists keep saying that “people are living longer!” Do they not know? Is their info that poor, or good, or old? I believe my info to be up-to-date. Could they be trying to BS me?? With antibiotic resistant superbugs becoming more prevalent, the new median age for us and our children could be the same as in 1350, and pretty darn quick!
Sorry I can’t give more concise info, this is all I get from the media. I can only assume they mean all men or women in a certain group, every time.

Well, you gave specific “average lifespan” numbers, but didn’t say when those numbers were the numbers. Was it last year? Ten years ago? A century?

@Seek The 76.6 was 15 years ago, 77.6 was 5 to 10 years ago, 76.6 was less than 5 years ago, and 76.3 was within the last 3 years. All for men, not women. My opinion is, on the whole (men AND women combined) the lifespan is increasing, or so they seem to say.
Here is another opinion I have. The CDC doesn’t want to scare the populace with the numbers of dead in regards to MRSA and other antibiotic resistant threats. (In 2007, 20% infected died. More than AIDS) When I had my MRSA run-in, I tried to inform the CDC of where I thought I got my bug. But they (in my opinion) blew me off. Said I could only get the infection from contact with another human or ? that had an infection. And I had no other contact!!! They asked no questions of me, none at all.

Funny, the timing of your question. This came out on Monday:

http://jezebel.com/study-finds-that-white-middle-aged-americans-are-dying-1740207611

~ Every day we live, we will live longer. ~

There used to be a site called realage dot com. (I did not check to see if it is still around , thus the spelled out dot .) You could enter your statistics and it would give you your life expectancy based upon the latest studies and actuarial data. The biggest factors were age, weight, height, smoking, family history, existing conditions. You could keep entering more detailed data like: Blood pressure, cholesterol, PSA, Do you ride a bicycle to work? How many sex partners have you had? Do you wear a seat belt? How many miles do you drive? .etc, and the numbers would get more fine tuned. The beauty of the page was that you could do this anonymously and play with numbers to see their effect. My Life Expectency was 96, meaning there is a 50% chance I will live to that age. (Or if you are a pessimist – a 50% chance I will die by that age.)
On average life expectancies are getting longer for people in the healthy weight .group. Unfortunately that is a smaller percentage of the population as a whole. Thus the average has turned around as the study in 2005 predicted.

We can’t control what others put in their mouths, be it: sugar, excessive food, drugs, cigarettes, etc. However we can take care of ourselves. Everything in life is better when you are in shape. Try your best to stay that way.

Nah. It just seems longer.

Update to my question: Life expectant average for men has fallen to 73.6.