The current generation of children may have shorter lifespans than their parents. This was reported far and wide earlier this year so I wouldn’t be surprised if you had heard it already.
Predicting the future is notoriously difficult and I’m going to work on this prediction with things we know only a few months later. Remember we have over 60 years of advances and changes to deal with, so excuse me if I don’t bet on this prediction.
The first point I would like to bring up is smoking. Anti smoking propaganda in school and at young ages keeps that known life expectancy shrinker at lower levels than for the people in older age groups.
And the children who do unfortunately get addicted to smoking? They know the health risks for their entire lives and thus are more likely to quit at some later date.
The reason they are predicting shorter life expectancies for today’s youth is simply because of increased levels of obesity. Obesity does bring up the odds of premature death, but smoking doubles even those high odds. It’s still worth quitting smoking in middle age even though often that leads to weight gain.
The second reason I think the reduced life expectancy prediction might not pan out is because of a cure of type 2 diabetes for mice. That’s right I said a cure.
It may be complex to translate this to humans but how about we give it 20 years. Yup. That’ll be on time for today’s youth. And you guessed it, obesity causes more type 2 diabetes and type 2 diabetes shortens your life for a number of reasons. Without this killer illness, maybe half the premature deaths could be halted.
We should also promote exercise as well. It might not sound like much to you, but putting motion into today’s video games like Wii and Kinects have done has potential for so much good. Imagine if we could get kids to do the recommended 2 hours of movement a day. Granted these systems have room for improvement but they are a start in the right direction. More exercise because of movement gaming means fewer obese young people.
Have you got predictions that have 77 years to go before fruition? Air them here. Perhaps we’ll let it go. But more likely we’ll show the larger likelihood of opposing truths.
