Perspective, 1900 health care v today, excellent points:

We’re sicker than ever.

Our food is tainted.

Our air is poisoned.

And the medical establishment? Well, let’s be honest: Half of the time they don’t know what they’re talking about.

This is America … in 1900.

And if you thought we were talking about today … you really need to stick around for what’s next.

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Here’s the good news about modern America: We’ve never been so focused on our health.

Here’s the bad news about modern America: We’ve never been so focused on our health.

Yes, it’s true that diet, exercise, and juices whose color seems like an evolutionary sign that they’ll kill you have never been bigger.

And that’s great! We could all stand to be a little healthier.

But the downside is that being this obsessed with wellness can make us lose perspective. These days, there’s a common notion that all this effort is necessary because we’re living in a uniquely unhealthy age. But, in reality, many of today’s health anxieties are things that even our recent ancestors would have regarded as high-class problems.

Consider America in 1900 — a year that’s probably only three or four generations away in most of our family trees.

In 1900, life expectancy in the U.S. was only a little over 47 years.i The three leading causes of death were pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea.ii In some American cities up to 30 percent of infants died before their first birthday.iii

Not a single American city was disinfecting their drinking water at the time.iv We were still six years away from the first national law regulating food quality.v And since medications weren’t regulated either, the quality was…

…let’s say hit-and-miss.

In other words, if you told someone from 1900 that one of your biggest health concerns was whether you were getting enough goji berries … they’d probably punch you in the face.

Now, none of this is to say we don’t have serious health problems today — we absolutely do. But here’s the catch: You can’t really understand those problems until you see them in the context of the incredible medical progress of the past century.

These days, for instance, we hear a lot about the epidemic of “chronic disease.” And it’s a real thing — but maybe not for the reasons you think.

It’s often implied that chronic disease is the result of some kind of unseen environmental toxins — that we’re all being poisoned by unsafe food, untrustworthy pharmaceutical companies, or pervasive “chemicals.”

But the real explanations are often a lot less sensationalistic … and a lot more conquerable.

Start with the term itself. “Chronic disease” means an ongoing affliction that you have to live with for years. And one of the reasons it seems like we have so much more of it these days is because we have so much less of that other kind of disease: The kind that just kills you stone dead.

Thanks to an effective vaccine, the U.S. eliminated smallpox — a disease with an average fatality rate of 30 percent — by 1952.vi

At the turn of the last century, tuberculosis was killing one out of every seven Americans.vii These days, the number of Americans who die from TB each year runs between 500-600viii — which, for context, is about 50 times lower than the number of people who die every year from falling at home.ix

In 1900, 30 percent of all American deaths were children under the age of five. By the end of the century that number was 1.4 percent.x

And these are all part of the explanation for why Americans’ life expectancies are now thirty years longer than our ancestors back in 1900.xi — a jump in human longevity unlike anything that has ever happened in the history of the planet..xii

What does all of this have to do with today’s health anxieties? Well, the longer you live, the more chance there is you’ll develop the diseases associated with … well, living longer. An older population is going to see more Alzheimer’s, more cancer, and more heart disease.

But even there the news is better than you might think.

For instance, when you hear that the number of annual cancer cases increased by 36 percent between 2000 and 2021,xiii it sounds like everything is going wrong. But media reports on numbers like that often leave out some important context.

The single biggest risk factor when it comes to cancer is agexiv — so it’s no surprise that the numbers go up as the population lives longer.

But when you adjust for the fact that Americans’ lifespans have increased, cancer cases actually fell by nearly six percent during that same window — and cancer deaths fell by over 27 percent.xv

It’s a similar story with heart disease. Yes, it’s America’s leading cause of deathxvi — but that means something very different than it used to. Thanks to new drugs, better detection, and improved surgical techniques, the risk of death from cardiovascular disease today is 75 percent lower than it was in 1950.xvii

Another reason cardiovascular disease is less potent, by the way, is that Americans smoke a lot less than they used to.xviii Which brings us to another important point in understanding chronic disease: Rather than being brought on by environmental toxins, a lot of it is attributable to our own behavior.

Americans have higher rates of obesity and diabetes than other comparable countries,xix for example, but some of the major causes are pretty clear.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of calories the average American eats in a day increased 15 percent between 1977 and 2017.xx And the CDC reports that more than 75 percent of Americans don’t get enough exercise.xxi

There’s also a third factor behind the chronic disease epidemic and it’s one that the media often ignores: In many cases, the numbers aren’t going up because more of us are getting sick; they’re going up because we’re getting better at detecting the sickness.

In recent years, for instance, there’ve been a lot of troubling stories about increasing rates of cancer in young people — which is enough to make anyone paranoid. But a big part of the story is that many people are getting tested younger.

The American Cancer Society reports that scans for colorectal cancer for people between the ages of 45-49 increased by 62 percent between 2019 and 2023.xxii That means more cases on paper — they’d be there whether we counted them or not — but it also means more people catching the disease earlier, when it’s more treatable.

And when you put all these pieces together, the picture of America’s health that emerges is pretty different from the stereotype.

It’s not that we’re sicker than ever — it’s that the sicknesses we’re focused on today are often the byproducts of other successes: longer lifespans, abundant food, better medical diagnostics.

It’s also not that we’re being poisoned by the pharmaceutical industry — in fact, whatever their other faults, it’s those companies that are churning out the treatments that are beating back cancer, heart disease, and, these days, even obesity.

So, yes, America has real health issues — and it’s important to keep combatting them. But it’s also important to keep them in perspective. Ask any American in the year 1900 if they’d change places with us, and they couldn’t say yes fast enough.

see: https://www.kiteandkeymedia.com/videos/chronic-disease-life-expectancy-health-cancer-incidence/

Contributed By Dr. Paul Cameron – Family Research Institute

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