Why are British elderly dying before their time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23028078

Just read this article about poverty and depression in the Welsh valleys and made me think about this thread. For years there has been a steady rise in life expectancy. What should we make of a sudden downturn? Is it just a blip or is it the beginning of a new trend. The gains in the past have resulted, I believe, from reduction in infections, modern drugs etc keeping older people alive who would have otherwise died, and a decline in smoking. Underlying this was increasing affluence. In the last 3 years the poor have got poorer - read the article before you disagree with this. It would not be surprising if their mortality was declining. Combine this with unhealthy lifestyles and it is easy to see that we could have reached the top of the curve for increased life expectancy - at least for now.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23028078

I do wonder to what extent the longevity of our generation is based on the careful nutrition of our childhood years.

I was a 'war baby', we do not hear that word banded around very much now, it is all baby boomers and generation X. For about 10 years our nutrition and food intake was controlled by rationing and off ration foods were usually things like fruit or vegetables, which many people grew for themselves, which are the food we are constantly being urged to eat now.

I suspect that childhood nutrition sets the mould for adult health, even if we are careless about self nurture later and having been carefully nourished as children, we are raping the benefits now

Too many digging their own graves with their knife and fork.

Yes agree Flick we are abusing (raping) the benefits now!!!

That makes desperate reading, Jess. Thanks for highlighting it.

That article is horrifying - the contrast is especially weird for me, as the next suburb to where I live in Ipswich, Queensland Australia, is called Ebbw Vale. This was a mining, woollen industry and railway area, just like the part of West Yorkshire I came from. Our mines are closed, and the woollen mills too, but we are near enough to Brisbane for most people to have work.

Actually, the article reminds me of the problems with poverty and lack of education in Aboriginal areas. Money has been thrown at the problems, but not much has worked, and despair is endemic. My own feeling for both areas, here and Wales, is that the authorities must listen to the locals, not just pretend to listen - really try to understand them and their problems. And the children must be a priority, especially their education, even if it means subsidising boarding school places, or pushing children into educational excellence, with really good teachers.

Areas of poverty, verging on absolute poverty, are just not acceptable in rich countries like Britain and Australia. Shame on the politicians. Shame on them, because they are the only ones with the power and the money to effect change.

Same in the North East, JessM.
Just listening to the local radio. There is the largest rate of malnutrition in the country in the north east. All pit villages or redundant steel towns. At least in Northumberland they have been doing opencast and then getting rid of the pitheaps. Durham and Darlington health trust is handing out protein drinks to people. It's appalling.
How has it happened? Why have we allowed it to happen?

Anyone read the comment underneath that article by "chunky"?

Government in a huff today because the Cardinal has criticised welfare cuts. They, the govt, claim that they are helping huge numbers of poor people "transform their lives.
I am so fed up with the word "reforms" I'm off to complain to BBC news that they are not using a more neutral term such a "changes".

Jess I agree a very sad article.
But I wonder whether simply replacing the jobs that have been lost in the heavy industries is sufficient?
I have a friend the same age as us who grew up in the valleys. She went to university and never went back to Wales to live. She said that none of her friends who had been given the opportunity to leave, through state education, had gone back either.
Is this an unintended consequence of higher education, that communities become polarised when all the bright young people leave and don't come back?

jingle I've just read the comment by "chunky" and am not quite sure what he is getting at when he says the article only concentrates on the negatives. Does he feel it is a positive to have four large supermarkets and a shopping outlet when most of the high streets are "dead"?

Other than the women who have made valiant efforts to set up a community centre in Waundeg, I find it difficult to see any "positives", especially when it's reported that the suicide rate in Wales rose by 30% between 2009 and 2011.

Since Granjura did her series of posts about the wonders of statins and the scaremongering (her words) of all of those who responded by pointing out the well documented and well authenticated evidence that they are not necessarily Gods gift to man, she has made response.

She has sung these paeans to statins before and castigated all those who dare to query her unquestioning belief in the medical advice she has received.

It would be nice to hear from her that she can accept that we can agree to differ on this subject and that there are deep divides in the medical community itself on this subject and that while she absolutely stands by her own opinions those who disagree with her are not ignoramuses unable to understand medical literature , nor are we scare mongering, we are merely reflecting the divided opinions that exist around statins.

Anything else feels patronising.

jingl thanks for bringing that to my attention. Interesting to have another perspective on this.,

Yes Eleothan. I think he is explaining why the town centre is mostly boarded up. ie not so much because there is no money about but because the money that there is is going to the four supermarkets.

Re the 'grub club', I had bread and jam for my tea when I was a child. I had had a cooked meal at school so that was reckoned to be enough. People often ate the cooked dinner at midday. Either at home or, the children, at school.

Chunky's wasn't the only dissenting voice. Another lady said that some people were living and working in the Valleys and trying to improve things, but that the negative image portrayed in articles like this discourages investment.
A vicious circle?

About nutrition - I agree that poor nutrition is probably the biggest cause of premature death. We were privileged to have had the wartime and post war eating habits: I spent my first 5 years, 1945-1950, eating mainly home grown produce and home killed meat such as rabbit, chicken and pork, plus fish my Dad caught (not necessarily legally). We ate vegetables from the garden, and eggs from our own bantams.

This sort of thing is the food of the rich and/or knowledgeable these days.

When we moved away from the fertile valley, we still had some home grown stuff, and of course rationing of sugar continued till I was 8. Mum always bought fresh food.Oh, and we had nutritionally balanced, school dinners too, however boring they were.

Many people eat food products these days, not real food. Too much transfat, too much sugar, too many carbohydrates, too many added chemicals such as preservatives, too much canola and soy, too many take-aways.

Early deaths (and bad behaviour - but that's another story) will continue until proper nutrition returns, if it ever does.

Do any of you know if canola oil is the same as rapeseed oil?

We have been using organic rapeseed oil for quite a long time now, believing it to be better for cooking at high temperatures than olive oil. I am now concerned having read joan's post.

Re statins - a consultant haematologist I was speaking to some time ago seemed somewhat sceptical about them. Do the benefits outweigh the side effects, and are there other, more natural ways to reduce cholesterol levels?

Here we are:
Rapeseed (Brassica napus), also known as rape,[1] oilseed rape,[1] rapa, rappi, rapaseed (and, in the case of one particular group of cultivars, canola), is a bright yellow flowering member of the family Brassicaceae (mustard or cabbage family). The name derives from the Latin for turnip, rāpa or rāpum, and is first recorded in English at the end of the 14th century. Older writers usually distinguished the turnip and rape by the adjectives round and long (-rooted), respectively.[2] Rutabagas, Brassica napobrassica are sometimes considered a variety of Brassica napus. Some botanists also include the closely related Brassica campestris within B. napus.

Canola is short for Canada Oil, and was once, I believe, intended to be machine oil for steam engines.

Here's the reference about Canola and Rape Seed:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed

I use butter, olive oil or coconut oil in cooking. Coconut oil is sold in solid form, and is terrific in frying 'cos your food tastes so much better. I've only just discovered it.

Joan - the lack of nutrition is huge killer of children world wide. As is lack of sanitation. But smoking is a much bigger killer of adults than nutrition either too much or too little. Even in well nourished non smokers it is possible exercise is more important - i believe there is some evidence that it is better to be a well exercised over weight person than an unexercised thin one.
There is a lot of demonisation of rape seed oil in the states - I'm not entirely sure where it came from. Could possibly be the corn oil producers behind the campaign? Growers do after all promote their products as healthy - the Florida orange growers have convinced generations of American moms that they should be feeding their kids pints of orange juice. And the cranberry producers have convinced millions that cranberry juice products (which have a lot of added sugar) are healthy and beneficial for bladder complaints.
But a recent impartial Cochrane review found that :Cranberry juice does not appear to have a significant benefit in preventing UTIs and may be unacceptable to consume in the long term. Cranberry products (such as tablets or capsules) were also ineffective (although had the same effect as taking antibiotics), possibly due to lack of potency of the 'active ingredient'. - See more at: http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001321/cranberries-for-preventing-urinary-tract-infections#sthash.yeYRkFRx.dpuf
So it seems entirely plausible to me that the corn oil farmers could have launched a dirty war.
Anyway back to rape seed oil...

The original form of rape seed oil was high in euric acid and hence its role as an industrial oil. Now there have been varieties bred that are so low in euric acid that they are considered safe for babies. In the UK it is, I am guessing, a much more productive way of farmers producing cooking oil than other crops. Several producers are producing high quality and organic versions that are beginning to compete with cold pressed virgin olive oil.

Jess I think the situation is changing.

I know that there are 79,000 deaths annually from lung cancer and 85% of these are linked to smoking. Smokers now make up 20% of the population and the number is falling, slowly.

But 23,000 deaths annually are linked to diabetes alone. And a recent report which called Britain the Fat Capital of Europe linked 1:11 deaths to obesity, this includes heart disease and cancers linked to being over weight.
But the number of overweight and obese is increasing year on year, in some parts of the UK it is 1:3.

Trying to treat type 2 diabetes and its side effects, such as heart disease, kidney failure, amputations, diabetic retinopathy, will cripple the NHS it has been said.

Yes, quite. See my post of Sat at 8.48. Globally though smoking related deaths still rising.
I do sometimes wonder about the effects of the war years. The folks who are in their early 80s were in junior school when the war started. I know a lot of poor people were better nourished during the war than during the 30s. But serous childhood illnesses were still rife: measles, diphtheria, polio, whooping cough, rheumatic fever etc and many spent years sleeping in anderson shelters etc Suspect most of the smokers in this cohort have been weeded out but there is still a batch that had a really unhealthy start in life. Will longevity bounce upwards once the healthier baby boomers get into their 80s. Everyone is expecting this.

Joseph Rowntree research shows that there will be 27% of children living in poverty in 2020, compared with the 5% forecast by the government last year, going on current trends.
They will not get the chances we did.

Hi JessM
Yes I think most are expecting longevity to bounce back in a decade or two, but will this be the case when theses seniors will have had to work longer for their pension and for those with little financial resources will have little or no welfare support in their latter years.
The government talks of ring fencing pensions, but by increasing pension age they are clawing back billions from those who have worked all of their lives. With longevity declining the years of pension entitlement will also decline.