We’re on the verge of a vast change in medicine. It’s centered on the gut biome. Near term we’ll see non-pharmaceutical treatments for autoimmune diseases. Without chronic and debilitating issues. lifespans on average will increase.
I think that you are absolutely correct on that point. All these antibiotics and fad diets do damage to the essential bacteria in your gut. When you start arbitrarily restricting entire food groups from your balanced common sense diet you are going to alter the makeup of your gut bacteria. You do it long enough and long term problems will result.
We have seen this in vegetarians in the past, now we are seeing problems in people who are restricting "carbs", etc. from their diets. With the vegetarians it was characterized by hair loss, certain types of skin problems and anemia. With some of the more recent fad diets the consequences have been much more serious... cardiac and other internal organ failure. The amazing thing to me is how we humans when faced with better health and increasing life spans always manage to find some way to allow simple stupidity to help reverse the trend.
The other thing that I found interesting in the article was their focus on financial issues related to a longer life span. I have been much busier since I retired than when I was “working”. A good percentage of my efforts have gone towards profitable endeavors. This is not a bad thing... healthy people of any age enjoy engaging in useful and profitable endeavors.
It is when you stop accomplishing useful tasks that you begin to feel worthless and die. The article has a lot of hand wringing over nothing on this topic. I think the article was written by a young person who has little experience with the elderly.
I believe what’s going to be found is that it isn’t necessarily that simple. It will be like whack-a-mole. People might get more years, but then face worse exits at the end of them than they might otherwise. Like one doctor told me, if everybody lived long enough, everybody would get a cancer.
At which point people will be thinking euthanasia to head off that final worst battle, and we will lose all grounding in what being human is about.
Hello. This isn’t supposed to be about living forever on earth. That’s what the old refrain about “Thy kingdom come” is about. We welcome heaven on earth first, then we go to join it permanently, and it’s not such a bad trip after all because we understand where we’re going.
Definitely. I hope it all hurries! The world looks very different when you see us as biomes! A lot of promise. Maybe a little less promiscuity once you start read by the risks of exposing yourself to OTHER biomes. Ha ha
Any hope for type 1 diabetics?