Lack Of Fitness Is A Societal Problem

Are you prepared for the medical expenses that may accompany your later years? It was about this time that humans began to see that they could cultivate crops and raise farm animals. We see the images left 30,000 years ago, drawn on the walls or ceilings of different caves long ago. In a cave on Sulawesi Island in Indonesia, next to a depiction of a wild pig, we see the images of human hands that were making their way in that incredibly challenging world. According to Lieberman, it was extremely perilous and difficult for slow, puny, weaponless hominins to enter into the rough, tough, and hazardous business of eating other animals for dinner. To survive and procreate under such conditions, it was essential to have the body of a professional athlete whose everyday existence required intense physical activity, suggests Lieberman. That world is now extinct and our bodies compete in a far more sedentary world. A growing number of us earn a living by sitting with a keyboard, focused on an intellectual challenge. Our bodies were finely matched to an environment we no longer live in. Today, they are mismatched, top to bottom, with our more sedentary world. The Journal of Physiology published a topical review that supports the mismatched view. Early farming was physically demanding and grueling too, but a new era was dawning. For example, researchers followed 334,161 Europeans for 12 years.

Here, There And Everywhere

He added that eliminating inactivity in Europe would cut mortality rates by nearly 7.5 percent. The number of overweight and obese individuals in the United States is growing. They have not learned the motor patterns to execute these basic movements. It’s very difficult to get a person through an obstacle course when they’re starting so far behind, and ten weeks isn’t enough to get them up to speed. You acquire most of your basic movement patterns by first grade, and our youth today just aren’t getting the physical education time they need. The injury rate is developing into a taxpayer concern in terms of medical care and lost training expenses. America is full of young men whose lives have been so inactive they cannot skip the way we all did as kids. It is not surprising that bodies designed to operate in an intensely physical world require continuous physical activity to function as they were designed. Yet we do the opposite. When individuals are followed longitudinally over many years from early adult life, they report a progressive decline in the amount of physical activity, producing a progressive decline in strength. If we stay on our current course, the costs will be unsustainable, and hundreds of millions of lives will be ruined.

Point Blank

This isn’t a fleeting issue. The costs of dealing with the frailty of aging are soaring out of control. And if our stories of the potential nightmarish death spiral ahead aren’t enough to motivate you to regain your strength, then the substantial financial loss you will encounter will. 66 percent will eventually be taken care of by family members. The result of family members devoting themselves to care of relatives will be a lifetime loss of more than $300,000 of income. Are you willing and able to help financially support the children or relatives who must now give up their work to care for you? In some areas, the average can be much higher. The median day rate for adult day care centers is lots. The bottom line is essential care is expensive. Yet baby boomers are ignoring what they face. That’s a crisis waiting to happen. Today, most of these costs are paid for by Medicare. But this coverage only lasts 100 days for a nursing facility, when people are pushed out to Medicaid.

Once Is Enough

A commission set up by Congress in 2013 failed to come up with any solution. An avalanche of cost is careening down the mountain at us, and no state or federal agency is doing a thing to prepare us. One of the smartest medical scientists in the United States is warning us that the last 10 years of our lives will be so awful, so miserable, so worthless, that we would be better off dead. Remember that gift of added years of life? That makes this crisis even worse. Fred’s grandfather was born when the life expectancy was 39 years. Back in his grandfather’s day, frailty with aging was not much of a problem, because life was so short that people did not experience decades of life at the bottom of the downward spiral of sarcopenia. The simple, brutal fact was they died before becoming disabled. Today, our average life expectancy is 80 years. As a result, we have 30 more years to survive with the terrible infirmities of sarcopenia. Even worse, chronic diseases have now become an epidemic. As we live longer, we have more time to accumulate noninfectious chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, asthma, and diabetes. Incidences of these diseases have soared in the last 20 years. And it keeps getting worse. As a nation, we spend two trillion dollars a year on care, yet 1 in 2 Americans suffer from chronic diseases that decrease quality of life and increase health costs. Estimates indicate that close to 200 million Americans alive today will have a chronic illness, and that 1 in 4 dollars will soon be spent on health care. Without basic reform, the burden and the cost of treating these chronic conditions will not be sustainable for future generations. Chronic disease can affect all Americans, and we need to focus on the steps we know will work best. Without prevention of frailty with aging, the costs will literally increase exponentially. From the trillion noted by Senator Kennedy in 2009, health spending in the United States grew to 3.2 trillion in 2015. There simply will not be enough money in the United States to treat people. So what are the primary approaches to prevention that might really make a big difference and turn things around? Indeed, this current approach ignores the critical question of quality of life. Thousands are now surging into their final decades every day.