We Are Healthier Now

Sorry. Its been a very long time since my last post. I moved to Georgia, took a new job and have been "settling in".

This is an intriguing article that really calls into question many assumptions of natural medicine. Many of us were indoctrinated with the idea that we moderns are now a sickly people descended from once robust stock. The reason - our devitalized food and synthetic drugs. However, the actual evidence seems to show the reverse.

This stat is derived from an analysis of army records from the civil war:

"Eighty percent had heart disease by the time they were 60, compared with less than 50 percent today."

There has been a long held belief in the field of natural healthcare that heart disease is a modern disease largely related to hi fat diet, sedentary lifestyle, etc. This is based on stats that put heart disease well down the list on leading causes of death in 1900 and number 1 today. However, that does not mean people did not have heart disease. It just means they died of something else. In the pre-antibiotic era, that something else was typically pneumonia. It actually appears that despite eating a diet that was more natural than ours and getting plenty of exercise, heart disease was more prevalent in the 19th century than it is today. It is only because we survive pneumonia and TB today that we live to die of heart disease and cancer later on.

Also, as evidence mounts that untreated bacterial infections may account for as much as 30% of heart disease, proper use of antibiotics may play a preventive role. Note I do not advocate injudicious of antibiotics. But if you have a dangerous bacterial infection, that is when they are indicated. As for cancer, the fact that more people seem to get cancer to day may just be an artifact of diagnosis. In pre-modern times, it was impossible to detect most cancers and very likely that an untreatable infection would take a person first. Imagine you are in the early stages of lung cancer and end up getting pneumonia in your weakened state. Your death certificate would say pneumonia and in most cases no autopsy would be done to determine the actual cause of death.

The article I mentioned earlier actually goes on to state that even cancer rates are lower today, as are arthritis and arteriosclerosis. What seems to be the main factors:

1. good childhood nutrition - which seems to mean primarily adequate calories, protein and fat rather than huge amounts of whole grains and veggies (NOTE: the balance tips depending on how one lives in one's later years, but even if you are obese, modern fatties still fare better than premodern fatties.)

2. prevention and treatment of infectious childhood diseases (NOTE: I would take exception to the idea that vaccines played the largest role in this; evidence suggest public health measures such as clean water and good sanitation were the key; however these measures were developed to address infectious disease and were based upon a new idea at the time: the germ theory of disease.)

As an aside, I would add that the strikingly good health of the Chinese over the centuries in comparison to some of their neighbors may have more to do with eating a diet with adequate meat in addition to being fairly adept at treating acute illnesses. One must also seriously question a core tenet of Naturopathic Medicine, which is that the treatment of acute illness with antibiotics is a primary cause of chronic illness. All things being equal, excessive use of antibiotics seems bad for individuals and society, but even abuse of antibiotics seems less likely to cause chronic illness than the failure to treat infections, especially in children.