What is the Average life expectancy
Life expectancy prior to the industrial age
What is the average life expectancy for humans? Modern humans have a lot to be thankful for the industrial age, and the advent of medical interventions and antibiotics. Prior to the modern era, and despite the lack of accurate record keeping, it is thought that the average life expectancy would have been around 40 years of age. There would have been many contributing factors to this number such as infant mortality, illness, wars and natural disasters.
Average Life Expectancy now
These days, barring accidents, which reduce drastically after we navigate through our teenage years and early 20s, we can expect to live for at least 80 years. In fact, men have a life expectancy of around 80 years, and women even longer at around 85 years of age. That should be no great surprise to anyone these days. Are you prepared to live for 80 years, and will your health last? Do you want to live longer than 80 years, or do you want to live for 100 years? If so, do you expect your health will make it to 100 years old? Or do you merely hope that your health will make it till then?
Lifespan
The average life expectancy has been steadily increasing for many years, and at the current rate, we should expect to live beyond 80 years – maybe even to 100! I am aware of commentators out there, who are projecting further into the future, and predicting a human lifespan of 120 years up to 150 years. I am not sure if this is true, but in any case, medical care is keeping us alive for much longer, so 100 years is becoming more common. The average life expectancy is known as Lifespan.
Health Span
Unfortunately, at the current rate of medical care and lifestyle expectations, the problem with living to an extended age, is more about illness and poor health. This is known as health span! Generally speaking, many of the poor health outcomes can be directly attributed to poor lifestyle decisions, which is something we can control.
Are we prepared to change our lifestyle such that our health span matches our lifespan?
Lifestyle is important
It is apparent that one of the most significant factors that contributes to Lifespan is lifestyle choices. This includes things like diet, exercise, sleep, and use of recreational drugs, such as tobacco and alcohol. There can be a plethora of information around the best type of diet, the best style of exercise, and how much alcohol one can consume safely. All of this information seems to confuse people to such an extent, tat they fail to make the appropriate lifestyle choices. I am very moderate in my opinions on these matters. I believe that as long as you make an attempt to eat healthy food, and make an attempt to exercise several times a week, then that is the best place to start.
Take control of Health span
The important message is that if we are prepared to make changes to our lifestyle choices, we actually improve the outlook of our health in later life. The way we manage our health can have long term ramifications. If we learn to control our diet, then we can also learn to manage our weight. If we learn how to manage our weight, then that makes it easier to exercise. When exercise is easier to do, we find that our motivation is easier also. And when we exercise happily, we find that it is easier to eat healthy food, and we take of our body. So this becomes a healthy loop where we take care of ourselves, and we take pride in keeping fit.
Why should we take care of our health?
There is no doubt that as we age, it becomes harder to maintain optimum fitness and vitality. That is not an excuse to ignore our health, rather it is an incentive to keep fit and healthy for as long as possible. When we maintain health and fitness, we naturally maintain a higher level of happiness and vitality. That is good for any age. But no matter how fit and healthy, we can always suffer a setback, such as illness or injury. The simple facts about aging are that it takes longer to bounce back when we are older. So we need to maintain high levels of fitness, so that we do not suffer a severe setback, and are able to recover quickly.
This leads me to the big Question:
“What if we could look forward to living to 100 years old and have good health?”
I think this is a really good question and note that I am not making a distinction between one or the other. I am suggesting we could have both long life AND good health. So if you were like me, and a bit worried about having a long life, but suffering from ill health, then maybe we can reset our expectations! But that comes with lifestyle change. If we are prepared to make the necessary lifestyle changes in order to extend our health span, then we can be very well prepared to live an extended life expectancy.
Why can’t we have a long lifespan AND good health?
The problem can be described as a mindset issue. Because we are accustomed to seeing our older generations suffering from ill health and poor mobility, doesn’t mean it has to be this way. It is true that for many of the older generations, they were not fortunate to have the latest medical care available that we have now. There was also a lack of understanding of the benefits of diet and exercise amongst previous generations. Suffice to say, we commonly observe ill health amongst older generations, and perhaps we set that expectation for ourselves.
Healthy living in old age
Due to advances in medical sciences, we can expect to have a longer life expectancy. But we also need to focus on maintaining better health and fitness into our old age. This is important because we can actually take control of our health span, by making important lifestyle changes. The benefit of improving our Health span is that we can make the changes in an effort to increase our health span to match our increasing Lifespan.
