We Got Better at Keeping You Alive. Not at Keeping You Healthy | Hacker News Reader

We Got Better at Keeping You Alive. Not at Keeping You Healthy

julienreszka.com

76 pointsjulienreszka22 comments

Poor commentary with no documentation or citation. At least point to the source of data for 200 plus countries. Presumably from IHME at the University of Washington.

This paper is worth reading. The caricature is not.

Global, regional, and national trends in the morbidity gap and contributing diseases, injuries, and risk factors, 1990–2023: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2023,” The Lancet Public Health, 2026, DOI: 10.1016/S2468-2667(26)00098-8

Also lovely new longitudinal data on centenarian heath across lifespan for a very large Swedish population that demonstrates persistent morbidity advantages compared to very well matched non-centenarians. Fun papers too: DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2025.103396

DOI: 10.1093/geroni/igaf050

DOU: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003784

And these conditions account are major contributors to the change: depression, anxiety, hearing loss, and low back pain. All are highly subject to diagnostic drift.

> depression, anxiety, hearing loss, and low back pain

I suffer from all of those things and I'm only halfway to 100, are you saying I wont make it there?

>This paper is worth reading. The caricature is not.

AI, is that you?

Carricature of what?

It's a commentary post. Doesn't need to cite everything, the numbers can easily be googled, and are not some cryptic, disputable, numbers to begin with, but widely available.

Choices a doctor makes keep you alive: surgery, medicine, that diagnostic scan.

The choices you make over 50+ years keep you healthy: reasonable exercise, sleep, and diet; avoiding chronic stress, drugs, tobacco, alcohol, obesity.

>avoiding chronic stress

If I only knew how

Medicine gets us to live longer. Food industry gets us to get sick sooner.

Food we ourselves decide to buy and eat. Nobody, absolutely nobody is blocking you or anybody else from buying tons of veggies and fruits, raw meat etc. Its cheap, cooking with it is trivial to reach cca average restaurant level of taste and one controls fully what final meal is composed of.

Some even say it tastes better when self-cooked, certainly less salty or greasy.

Then the argument comes - who has time for all that. From people who often spend unreasonable amount of time online not really doing anything worthwhile to be polite, or in front of TV if older generations.

Healthy eating is available at restaurants too (Taco Bell being an amusing example - grilled chicken, beans, vegetables, and leafy greens) but people choose not to avail themselves of it. The straw man "Average American" is conditioned by companies to enjoy textureless, mild food loaded with fat, salt, and sugar so that they're never satiated and always craving more. Fiber and texture fly in the face of this so we end up with generations of people raised to eat chicky nuggies and bacon ranch dressing with a side of iceberg lettuce because onions are icky.

>Nobody, absolutely nobody is blocking you or anybody else from buying tons of veggies and fruits, raw meat etc. Its cheap, cooking with it is trivial to reach cca average restaurant level of taste and one controls fully what final meal is composed of.

Are you not familiar with the concept of food deserts?

Food deserts are actually very controversial topic outside the bubbles where the term is used.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/03/food-justice-u... https://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/132076786/the-root-the-myth-o...

> Food we ourselves decide to buy and eat.

Word 'decide' makes all the heavy lifting here. How come Japanese, Koreans and others make so much better decisions? Your decisions are a function of your environment and your education. Why don't Americans get good food environment and good food education?

"I Saw 120 Patients This Week. Here's Why They Were Actually Sick." @DrAlexWibberley

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UiVKh97rJsg

what's the tl;dw?

B.c in modern society people don't eat enough whole foods, get good sleep b.c of alcohol and other over stimulation, not enough outdoors/consistent movements/exercise, have to be saddled with too much stress etc and end up slowly killing themselves (in unnatural ways) without realizing or potentially caring

He worked 4 nightshifts in A&E in UK, and he tabulated the 120 patients. He thought that most middle-aged patients with heart problems were only there due to their lifestyle choices in the previous decade(s).

He tried to argue that if we had more preventative/proactive health decisions then A&E wouldn't be overrun with sick people. He implied they should be the dying of old age instead.

He said they failed to save an 8 year old girl who ate a button cell, because the department was overrun with people with acute emergency issues due to lifestyle. She died after arrival (he talked about how the electricity can cause fatal damages).

I didn't find his conclusions made sense to me, but I still felt the video was worthwhile watching (especially if you are middle aged like me).

In our village, people used to die of old age only and not due to any health problems. Village doctors used plant based medicine and treat the common illness such as fever or broken bones. This was in the 60's and 70's.

How does one die of old age?

It's a bit of a facetious question, hence the downvotes, but I do think you have a point. You die of something - perhaps they're saying that people simply just... ran out of life/energy/steam and pass in their sleep? It does seem like the ideal situation.

My grandfather just went to sleep one night and never woke up. Mid 70's. It's clearly for 'some' reason but it wasn't some long drawn out illness like cancer or some sort of progressive congestive heart failure. Everyone just chalks that up to old age.

So probably things like aneurysm, burst artery in the brain, heart attack, blood clots arriving to lungs and so on.

But then there is also this shutdown where body starts switching off organs one by one, and hospital personnel know this well since its visible to trained eye, and known as time of no return. My grandfather went away like that.

Yeah I'm not familiar with that way but it makes sense!

Old age is rough but I would rather go out that way than a long drawn out terminal illness.

What age were they when they died?

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