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This is one thing that really changed my view on healthfulness. Here [1] is a list of Ancient Greeks. Looking at the age of death (for those that did not die in

This is one thing that really changed my view on healthfulness. Here [1] is a list of Ancient Greeks. Looking at the age of death (for those that did not die in things such as war) does not really look all that different from modern society. But for all of the Greeks wonder and ingenuity, they remained mostly completely ignorant of medicine and illness. Miasma Theory [2] persisted as the dominant medical view throughout their civilization. Water 'purification' in most cases (on occasion it was boiled) did nothing to remove the tasteless toxins that can cause illness and water was mostly just judged by how clear it looked and how it tasted/smelled. Food safety again being something of a sniff/taste test. Vaccines of course would not be invented for thousands of years. Some of the quirks of their civilization included shared butt wiping sponges at public toilets - you'd clean off the sponge using either running water, or on occasion a bucket of vinegar. And so on. The point of this is that if we provided these Ancient Greeks with nothing but urgent life-saving emergency care from modern technology, it's highly likely that their life expectancy would dwarf ours of today. So what exactly was it in their culture that we've lost? They did so many things so differently that we can probably all kick in some confirmation bias to support our own personal hypotheses for some particular subset. But I prefer to just look at things holistically and consider that aiming to emulate their lifestyles is probably a better overall way to aim for a long and healthy life than is relying so heavily on medicine and technology. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_Greeks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_Greeks [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory --------------- EDIT: Just, completely coincidentally, saw another related article here [3]. Anyhow, it provides an important datum: "More than 23 percent of Americans took three or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days, according to a 2017 CDC estimate. Furthermore, 39 percent over age 65 take five or more, a number that’s increased three-fold in the last several decades. There are about 1,000 known side effects and 5,000 drugs on the market, making for nearly 125 billion possible side effects between all possible pairs of drugs. Most of these have never been prescribed together, let alone systematically studied, according to the Stanford researchers." [3] - http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-predict-the-side-effects-of-millions-of-drug-combinations http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-predict-the-side-effects-of...

batiudrami 8y ago
"The point of this is that if we provided these Ancient Greeks with nothing but urgent life-saving emergency care from modern technology, it's highly likely that their life expectancy would dwarf ours of today." This is something you can't possibly determine. Ancient Greeks famous enough to have their own Wikipedia pages may not have had penicillin but on balance they certainly would have lived easier lives than peasants who worked years of hard labour just to survive, and would have lived longer because of it. It is also, quite literally, survivorship bias - people who lived to be older had more time to achieve things and become notable enough to make Wikipedia. The thing with getting old, as noted in the article, is that past a certain age if one thing doesn't get ya, another thing probably will. Modern medicine is not a buff which will add +X years to all humans regardless of circumstance, it is just about staving off the first few things which try and kill you - and that's why, by all accounts (including this article), life expectancy is longer now than it was in the past. And for the record boiling water works just fine at killing bacteria living in it. It's not magic and if your water is still full of arsenic you'll still die, but it's much better than nothing.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Right, I am not talking about the peasants of the time. 'We', as in the masses, more readily associate with the peasants than the aristocracy but in reality the average person today lives a life that's certainly more luxurious, in terms of things, than the aristocracy of the time. In terms of objective luxuries, people today have vastly more: reliable indoor plumbing, easy and rapid transportation, consistent and practically unlimited running water, air conditioning, practically unlimited access to whatever sorts of food (even exotic) you care to purchase, and much more. So entitled have we become that it feels kind of silly to call those things luxuries! The life of the luxurious Ancient Greek would have likely been more interesting due to power and prestige, but they did not have objectively better lives in terms of 'things' than even an average individual today. And now a days I think it goes without saying that the average person exerts substantially less energy per day than even our luxurious Ancient Greeks did. Lives are much easier. Another interesting thing is also not all of the Ancient Greeks you know were living lives of luxury, even by standards of their time. Socrates was born to a stonemason, served in the military, and lived his later life in voluntary poverty - offering up 100 drachmae as a punishment for the allegations that would lead to his execution. 100 drachmae was 1/5th of his entire life's wealth. For some scale, an unskilled worker would earn around 1 drachma a day, a skilled worker would earn around 5 drachma a day. He was executed at age 71, still in extremely good health. --- And yeah, on the boiling - I was stating that they did on occasion genuinely purify their water. However, the sniff/taste test was the norm with boiling the occasional exception.

batiudrami 8y ago

"The point of this is that if we provided these Ancient Greeks with nothing but urgent life-saving emergency care from modern technology, it's highly likely that their life expectancy would dwarf ours of today." This is something you can't possibly determine. Ancient Greeks famous enough to have their own Wikipedia pages may not have had penicillin but on balance they certainly would have lived easier lives than peasants who worked years of hard labour just to survive, and would have lived longer because of it. It is also, quite literally, survivorship bias - people who lived to be older had more time to achieve things and become notable enough to make Wikipedia. The thing with getting old, as noted in the article, is that past a certain age if one thing doesn't get ya, another thing probably will. Modern medicine is not a buff which will add +X years to all humans regardless of circumstance, it is just about staving off the first few things which try and kill you - and that's why, by all accounts (including this article), life expectancy is longer now than it was in the past. And for the record boiling water works just fine at killing bacteria living in it. It's not magic and if your water is still full of arsenic you'll still die, but it's much better than nothing.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Right, I am not talking about the peasants of the time. 'We', as in the masses, more readily associate with the peasants than the aristocracy but in reality the average person today lives a life that's certainly more luxurious, in terms of things, than the aristocracy of the time. In terms of objective luxuries, people today have vastly more: reliable indoor plumbing, easy and rapid transportation, consistent and practically unlimited running water, air conditioning, practically unlimited access to whatever sorts of food (even exotic) you care to purchase, and much more. So entitled have we become that it feels kind of silly to call those things luxuries! The life of the luxurious Ancient Greek would have likely been more interesting due to power and prestige, but they did not have objectively better lives in terms of 'things' than even an average individual today. And now a days I think it goes without saying that the average person exerts substantially less energy per day than even our luxurious Ancient Greeks did. Lives are much easier. Another interesting thing is also not all of the Ancient Greeks you know were living lives of luxury, even by standards of their time. Socrates was born to a stonemason, served in the military, and lived his later life in voluntary poverty - offering up 100 drachmae as a punishment for the allegations that would lead to his execution. 100 drachmae was 1/5th of his entire life's wealth. For some scale, an unskilled worker would earn around 1 drachma a day, a skilled worker would earn around 5 drachma a day. He was executed at age 71, still in extremely good health. --- And yeah, on the boiling - I was stating that they did on occasion genuinely purify their water. However, the sniff/taste test was the norm with boiling the occasional exception.