There is no doubt that health services in most western countries are currently under a huge strain trying to cope with increasing disease, illness, and an aging population. We are seeing an epidemic of chronic diseases, from heart illnesses to cancer, from arthritis to diabetes, and we are taking more pharmaceutical drugs than ever before.
The general explanation for the rise in such diseases is that we are all living longer. As cancer researcher Robert Weinberg explains: “Cancer is an inevitability the moment you create complex multicellular organisms and give the individual cells the licence to proliferate. If we lived long enough, sooner or later, we would all get cancer.”
The idea of an epidemic is, therefore, an illusion. Cancer was not prevalent 150 years ago because people were not living long enough to develop the disease. It sounds plausible enough, until you look at the facts. It is true that life expectancy is increasing; however, that is precisely what it is, an expectation. It doesn’t mean that people weren’t living into their 70s and 80s a hundred years ago but only that fewer actually were.
In 1850, for example, those who survived the first few years of life, and managed to avoid infectious diseases, often from poor public sanitation and water, could live, on average, until the age of 75.
Therefore, some people were living as long as we do now. The life expectancy today, for people living in a developed country, is 78. The difference is that those people living 100 years ago had neither cancer nor heart disease featuring as a major cause of death.
In fact, the two major killers of today did not even feature in the top 10 causes of death 160 years ago. Turn the clock forward 50 years, to 1900, and suddenly heart disease is the fourth major cause of death, stroke is the fifth and cancer is the eighth. In the present day, of course, cancer and heart disease are the two major killers, responsible for around 25 million deaths worldwide, every year.
Food may be filling the shelves and freezers in our stores and supermarkets; however, it has no nutritional value
We have to ask ourselves: what happened between 1850 and 1900? The answer is the birth of the modern era. The Industrial Revolution, which sparked into life a century earlier, was reaching its manufacturing peak, people had moved to the cities and urban areas to work in factories (in most western countries). Pollution was rife, as industries spewed out their smoke and noxious substances into the atmosphere. In countries with less industrial factories, the motor vehicle began to appear, again, spewing out noxious toxins into the air.
Along with urbanisation came the need to provide a quicker and cheaper way of getting food to the masses. One response to this social shift was the development of roller mills for making bread. This system stripped layers away from wheat grains. While this was more efficient, it drastically reduced the nutritional value of bread.
Turn the clock forward, again to current times, and the means of getting food quickly and with a long shelf life out to the larger populations has become ever more pervasive, touching every aspect of the food industry. It’s called ‘food processing’ and the result, according to the 2016 Global Nutrition Report, has been to make more malnutrition ‘the new normal’, as explained by the group’s co-chairman Lawrence Haddad.
The report estimates that one in three of us living in the prosperous west, is malnourished. Food may be filling the shelves and freezers in our stores and supermarkets; however, it has no nutritional value. Instead, it is being loaded with sugars for taste and stripped of its natural nutrients to improve longevity.
The result is an epidemic of obesity and chronic disease.
There has been a backlash against processed foods, with people turning back to ‘real’ and organic vegetables and fruit. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the rate of stomach and bladder cancers has fallen faster over the past decade than any other cancer.
There has been a similar fall in the rate of deaths due to cardiovascular disease, which has been halved in the UK since 1961. This is another indication that perhaps nutritious food can reverse the epidemic of chronic disorders.
These reversals refute the standard view that chronic diseases in general, and cancer, in particular, are the inevitable consequence of living longer and getting older. Age may be a factor, but mainly in the sense that, if you eat in a sea of industrial pollutants during your whole life, then chronic disease is indeed likely to be your fate.
Cancer and other chronic conditions are not related to ageing per se but to the lifestyles we lead, the foods we consume and the environments we live in. Most importantly, these diseases are preventable and, in some instances, even reversible. Disease isn’t something that just happens to us, but is the consequence of what we do to ourselves.
kathrynmborg@yahoo.com