In this video, I look at the evidence on lifespan and healthy lifespan, explain why they are diverging, and ask what is driving the trend. Poverty, insecure work, poor housing, ultra-processed food, excessive reliance on medication and growing inequality all play a part. Unless we tackle those underlying causes, social care costs will continue to rise.
Seems to be an increase in unhealthy life years at the top end. This might be due to care homes which are mainly private doing a better job of keeping people alive.
Two sure ways to stop that trend are 1)socialism and 2)Canadian levels of assisted suicide, and I don’t like either
Too much sugar. Too much fructose. Too much seed oils. Too many childhood vaccines. Global Warming.
Who the bugger knows? Years of Alzheimer’s research have failed even to pin down the immediate cause (not helped by an important research group having proved crooked).
I saw a headline yesterday which claimed that too much sugar in a baby’s first two years increases the chance of Alzheimers. If they reached this conclusion by looking either side of when rationing ended here they may be onto something, but how might that correlate with the USA, where there was no rationing. And what about Japan?
And what about all the other foodstuffs which were rationed during the same period?
Or the decrease in the rate of Alzheimer’s could equally well be ‘explained’ by German bombing. Post hoc ergo propter hoc claims another victim.
Or exposure to Vera Lynn.
Perhaps it’s because we’re all living longer and therefore more likely to cop it?
I dunno.
Seems like the most likely explanation.
When is he going to start the cult? It can only be a matter of time before he’s making videos hawking magic pills.
Spud’s cure for Alzheimer’s is tax it until people forget they ever had any money
Jokes about Spud aside. One thing I’d like to know is exactly how “healthy lifespan” is being measured.
If the definition of “healthy” includes having a diagnosed condition, then surely changes in diagnosis rates and criteria affect the figures?
For example, autism and ADHD diagnoses have increased massively, practically everyone now has something wrong with them and wears it like a badge of honour, talk to anyone at works and their kids are on ‘the spectrum’, both my sister’s two daughters are and now she’s getting diagnosed too. Now I always thought she was just a bone-idle daddy’s girl but no, now she’s a mong as well who apparently can’t see anything through or finish anything, or get a job so there must be something ‘wrong’ with her. I know what’s wrong with her. She’s always been a daddy’s girl. Got given a half million pound house, a rental property and 25 acres of farmland and she doesn’t know what to do with all her free time other than mope about. If she got a sharp kick up the arse her healthy lifespan will probably increase by 10 years or more!
If more people are now counted as having a condition that previously wouldn’t have appeared in the data, does that automatically reduce the calculated healthy lifespan even if the person’s actual ability to work, exercise, live independently etc hasn’t changed? Hmm?
I’m not saying those conditions aren’t real or that they don’t affect some people’s health – they clearly can but I wonder how much of the supposed change is a genuine decline in population health and how much is changes in what we measure and where we draw the line between “healthy” and “unhealthy”. Because all of this seems to have occurred post CoVid where vast swathes of people realised they could sit at home doing bugger-all and got to like it rather too much.
Ten years ago, when I first noticed the mental health stuff – people constantly banging on about it – I was sympathetic.
Now I just reckon it’s another strand in the Commie plot to pick society apart, and to enervate it, any old how.
Oh come on! There are definitely more lunatics* about these days. I meet them daily. And that well predates Covid.
*What some people do & say, I can only believe it’s due to mental problems.. There’s no other rational explanations.
It’s not the loonies I am talking about, it’s the demands made by them and the reactions to them.
Those demands/reactions are an extension of the usual victim poker stakes.
Very much so – some boffin (can’t recall the link) separated out the unhealthy life years due to physical conditions, and they HAVE NOT changed. The entirety of the increase in unhealthy life years is survey reported mental health conditions – and there’s been an increase in incentives here, as well as near impossible to verify some of them clinically.
I’m with Dr Snowdon who doesn’t see the reason you need more money to live if you’re mentally ill. Physical conditions, you need to pay taxis and other good reasons you might need an extra payment, but being ADHD doesn’t mean you need more clothes or food or cars unless I’ve missed something
Some of the times when my wife gets annoyed with me she suggests that I am “on the spectrum”: I have resisted any suggestion that I get diagnosed as that might be used to suggest that autistic people do not need help – not all do but that does not mean that *none* need help.
AFAIK being bone idle is *not* a feature of being on the autistic spectrum – the popular view is that autistic people tend to be focussed on doing the job in hand and work harder than most of those who are not “on the spectrum”. My younger son, who *has* got a diagnosis worked his way up from a primary school for children with “Moderate Learning Difficulties”, via a secondary school 10 miles away for MLD students and the maths class in a neighbouring mainstream school (a *thinking* teacher reckoned he had a better chance of being accepted by the “mainstream” pupils if he came top, or near-top, in maths) to a mainstream school in the next town from which he got a university place to read “Maths and Psychology”, disappointed with his first job which under-used his talents he then got a M.Res. at Keele. That required a *massive* amount of effort.
EVERYBODY on this site: please do not blame autistic people for the idleness of others.
ADHD – when I was taking my elder son to the meetings of the local branch of the National Society of Gifted Children (almost all of whom had been let down by the socialist doctrines dominating their Local Education Authority) I met some kids with ADHD – as one might guess from the H in ADHD *none* of them was lazy.
*Some* of the people on the autistic spectrum genuinely need help – there was one boy in my younger son’s primary school class who could not use words to communicate … There is a vast range between that and a guy with a degree in (Maths and) Psychology but I hope that you can guess some of those in that range need a hand-*up* in order to cope in a world designed by and for the “neuro-typical”
This is one of the things that really annoys me. *EVERYBODY* is “on” the spectrum, THAT’S WHAT “SPECTRUM” MEANS!!!!!
No, not everyone, just as infra-red and ultra-violet are not on the spectrum of visible light. The “Autistic Spectrum” is a subset of humanity just as the spectrum of visible light is a subset of radiation.
There are an awful lot of people “on the spectrum” – the number depends on how you choose to define “autism” and “autistic” but it is a minority. With some choices of definition the spectrum is so broad as to make “on the spectrum” pretty much useless as a description so I can understand your annoyance..
Psychiatrists love a ‘spectrum’ as it greatly assists their efforts to medicalise the entire population.
I’m not blaming people with genuine autism or ADHD at all, I’ve already said that. There are obviously people with very real difficulties who deserve support and reasonable accommodation. And I know that support just isn’t there, especially for kids.
My point is that it also seems obvious diagnosis has expanded enormously. Thirty or forty years ago, autism was considered relatively rare. Now you can barely go five minutes without someone describing themselves or a family member as “neurodivergent”. Just in my own circle it’s both my sister’s daughters, my sister herself deciding at 50 that she’s autistic (rather than, perhaps, considering other explanations for changes in how she feels), several colleagues’ children, and numerous people in social groups who’ve gone for an assessment to “explains everything”. Explain what? You’re nearly 60 and have had a reasonably successful life?
That doesn’t automatically mean all those diagnoses are wrong but it does make me wonder whether we’ve broadened the criteria to the point where we’re classifying far more people than we once did. Or, if the criteria hasn’t broadened then something really serious has cracked off to cause it.
Which brings me back to my original question. If “healthy lifespan” statistics count diagnosed conditions, then surely changes in diagnostic criteria and diagnosis rates will affect those figures. If someone who would have been considered healthy 30 years ago is now classified as having a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition, does that reduce the calculated healthy lifespan even if their ability to work, exercise, live independently and enjoy life hasn’t actually changed?
That’s a genuine question, because if the measurement changes, then some of the apparent decline could be due to how we’re defining and recording health rather than a real deterioration in the population’s health.
My observation, as a parent of two schoolchildren c.30 years ago was that the Local Education Authority was *much* more willing to provide support to children on the autistic spectrum than to “gifted” children. Some of this was due to stupid ideas about “equality” (equality of outcome viewed as preferable to equality of opportunity) but a lot was due to the pernicious envy of local bureaucrats of children who were so visibly superior to them at schoolwork.
If you ain’t dying of cholera, famine, malnutrition, wars or industrial accidents (etc etc), you will grow old to suffer from diseases of the old.
Solution: Abolish H&S at work, send kids up chimneys and down the mines, restrict food to 500 calories a day (diabetes cured too!) and require all WC to be disconnected from the sewers and dumped in the yard. No chlorine in water supplies.
Result: Cancer and dementia rates plummet. Hurrah!
Can Spud not see this? Or the grift so strong on this one?
Anyone seen Logan’s Run – another solution to the diseases of the aged.
Logan’s Run. Jenny Agutter. Phwoor!
Was there anything Ms Agutter appeared in between The Railway Children and Ask the Midwife where she didn’t get her kit off?
Praise be to God, no.
Hell yes. And Walkabout.
Never seen it, read the book, loved it (fantasise myself on the run but knew I could never have given up my job to do it).
Or, Alzheimer’s is caused by not having had cancer.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/complex-cancer-alzheimer-s-connection
See? Nobody bloody knows.
People are living longer and are now suffering conditions that are associated with living longer.
When I were’t lad you had diptheria, tetanus, scarlet fever, measles, polio, typhoid, whooping cough, poor diet et al, that would do for you before you got to adolescence. We have virtually eradicated these diseases so now it’s something else that will get us. What a surprise. More research and funding money needed please…..
Spud doesn’t care about any of that stuff. He mentions it because YOU care. Like all commie dicks, he uses your empathy against you.
Unless we tackle those underlying causes, social care costs will continue to rise.
Gamecock suggests you get rid of social care. Then costs go away completely.
“Charity is not a legitimate function of government.”
Remind me again what qualifications, knowledge, or experience the Spud has to discuss health, nutrition, drug interaction, or longevity. Cripes, he wasn’t (isn’t) even capable of talking sense in his area of professed qualification, let alone completely unrelated fields.
OT… Diane Abbott readmitted to Labour….. Nothing changes , clearly the (…) feel they’ve cover now
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/07/30/diane-abbott-readmitted-to-labour/
…
Damn! I can’t unsee that.