4 ms·

No one knows why.... Obesity is up. As we move away from a labor economy fewer people work on farms and factory, we eat the same number of calories, or more, a

by drakaal 13y ago

No one knows why.... Obesity is up. As we move away from a labor economy fewer people work on farms and factory, we eat the same number of calories, or more, and do less. More women are in the work place, and that's stressful... Job related stress shortens lives. Sure in the old nuclear family where mom stayed home and raised the kids that was stressful too, but with nannies and day care we still have people in that role, and now you have more single moms doing work and home on their own. Ethnic diversity due to an increase in the number of immigrants from developing nations. We have a lot more people from countries that had much shorter life spans than the US. Enough to move the numbers. Like it or not while Asia has people who live the longest the average is much shorter than those from Europe, and Mexico and Central America are much shorter still.

VLM 13y ago
There's a chronological problem with your theoretically logical idea where the farm worker collapse started near the turn of the last century (1900) and smoothly over the decades pretty much anyone who was leaving the farm had left by 1970 but fatness indicators like number of diagnosed diabetes patients didn't start expanding (sorry for pun) until late 1990s (about 20 years after an explosion in corn syrup consumption in the USA, surely just a coincidence). So there is a 90 to 20 year gap depending how you want to run the numbers to explain, why the workers are already gone but not sick yet. There's also a numerical hole where at peak we're talking about 10 million or so american farm workers leaving the farm over the 1900s, but 1/3 or so of 400 million aka over 100 million getting fat. If 10 million changed jobs and 10 million got fat, even if we don't have data to prove its the same 10 mil my spidey sense would tingle, but you're off by a factor of ten. Also the point of the article graph is rural Montana is not the place to be if you're a woman aspiring to be old, but rural Montana never had quite the same industrial production as NYC or the WWII aircraft plants in WA. So thats a geographic issue. The problem with your theory about short lived Mexicans is my general lifetime knowledge about where you'll find illegals living maps pretty decently with where people are actually living longer. Its as though immigrants were not exposed to certain industrial or agricultural toxins in the 3rd world that we expose our own kids to. For example no one in New Mexico (well, there's an accurate name) can speak English anymore, but the article map show's they're ridiculously healthy compared to, say, pasty white rural northern Wisconsin where I'm pretty sure they have a hunting season for illegals. Which is interesting. (edited to add, I liked your post a lot, because it used logical thinking to come up with apparently reasonable falsifiable hypothesis, which is awesome, keep on doing it. Problems need theoreticians and experimentalists to solve them, just one isn't going to do it alone. Theoreticians do need thick skin since 90% of their theories aren't going to work and its nothing personal)
- drakaal 13y ago
  I said farm and Factory. We also drive more and walk less, we are a much less active people than we were. I didn't say illegals, but people of Indo and Asian descent have shorter lives for the most part compared to Caucasians. I'm not saying my presentation of facts was perfect, but I can dig around there are plenty of studies (and I hate studies as opposed to experiments) that these observations were pulled from. My point was really that there are lots of reasons, and likely it isn't "just one", but they aren't "unknown".

by drakaal 13y ago

VLM 13y ago

There's a chronological problem with your theoretically logical idea where the farm worker collapse started near the turn of the last century (1900) and smoothly over the decades pretty much anyone who was leaving the farm had left by 1970 but fatness indicators like number of diagnosed diabetes patients didn't start expanding (sorry for pun) until late 1990s (about 20 years after an explosion in corn syrup consumption in the USA, surely just a coincidence). So there is a 90 to 20 year gap depending how you want to run the numbers to explain, why the workers are already gone but not sick yet. There's also a numerical hole where at peak we're talking about 10 million or so american farm workers leaving the farm over the 1900s, but 1/3 or so of 400 million aka over 100 million getting fat. If 10 million changed jobs and 10 million got fat, even if we don't have data to prove its the same 10 mil my spidey sense would tingle, but you're off by a factor of ten. Also the point of the article graph is rural Montana is not the place to be if you're a woman aspiring to be old, but rural Montana never had quite the same industrial production as NYC or the WWII aircraft plants in WA. So thats a geographic issue. The problem with your theory about short lived Mexicans is my general lifetime knowledge about where you'll find illegals living maps pretty decently with where people are actually living longer. Its as though immigrants were not exposed to certain industrial or agricultural toxins in the 3rd world that we expose our own kids to. For example no one in New Mexico (well, there's an accurate name) can speak English anymore, but the article map show's they're ridiculously healthy compared to, say, pasty white rural northern Wisconsin where I'm pretty sure they have a hunting season for illegals. Which is interesting. (edited to add, I liked your post a lot, because it used logical thinking to come up with apparently reasonable falsifiable hypothesis, which is awesome, keep on doing it. Problems need theoreticians and experimentalists to solve them, just one isn't going to do it alone. Theoreticians do need thick skin since 90% of their theories aren't going to work and its nothing personal)

drakaal 13y ago
I said farm and Factory. We also drive more and walk less, we are a much less active people than we were. I didn't say illegals, but people of Indo and Asian descent have shorter lives for the most part compared to Caucasians. I'm not saying my presentation of facts was perfect, but I can dig around there are plenty of studies (and I hate studies as opposed to experiments) that these observations were pulled from. My point was really that there are lots of reasons, and likely it isn't "just one", but they aren't "unknown".