Are Humans Less Healthy Today Than We Were In The Past?

Professor Tim Noakes looks to scientific evidence for answers to this timely question.

- Tim Noakes

There is a common belief that, because of great strides in medical care, we humans are healthier today than we’ve ever been at any time in our history. But the scientific evidence tells a different story. The nation with the most expensive healthcare system in the world – the USA – ranks only 46th on the global lifeexpectancy charts and has experienced a falling life expectancy since 2014.

If we go back more than a century, we find people in Britain who lived as long as we do today. When my greatgrandparents were living in mid-Victorian England 170 years ago, it was a period of great food abundance.

Farm-produced real foods were available in such surplus that everyone was eating highly nutritious diets. As a result, in 1875 the life expectancy of those who did not die in infancy was the equal of modern Britons. The profile of fatal diseases was also quite different from today. Whilst mid-Victorians were quite likely to die from infections and trauma, they were essentially immune to coronary heart disease and cancer – two modernday scourges.

The mid-Victorians’ healthy diet included vegetables; fresh and dried fruit; legumes and nuts; fish; meat sourced from free-range animals, especially pork, and including offal; eggs from hens kept by most urban households, and hard cheeses.