Then also before this was Pasteur and his flawed germ theory. So they began boiling milk until it turned into something useless if not downright harmful. (Milk stops being milk when you boil past 70 Celsius).
Fastforward to early 80's: they began telling us fat is bad for us (it is not, check Eric Berg on EWEtube). So sheep that most people are who need to be told what is good or not, they wrongly assumed sugar was safe, since nobody said sugar was bad. That is also why you have low-fat milk and other such nonsense.
Further down the historic line, various fads appeared. Sexy girls wrote books on how meat is dangerous and persuaded the gullible that since the cattle are being pumped all sortsa chem, so being a vegan is the right healthy thing to do.. (flaw: just cuz there is bad meat doesn't mean all meat is bad or veganism good, check the death rates of young Vegans dropping like flies on catwalks).
So my point is that along come so many experts and tell us so many false things, that it becomes difficult to navigate the noise and latch on to useful signals. One such noise is the article, which extrapolates an anecdotal or Personal observation as true for all people.
To make it sound scary, they even add "professional" decline, with all the menacing undertones it carries. I know there is nothing wrong in preparing for older age, and for some it can be faster than for others due to so many factors (such as aluminum consumption which causes dementia and doesn't exit the body--good ole Al lodges in the brain cells).
What is wrong with this article is scare-mongering and becoming a cry-wolf story rather than an intellectually valid, science-backed article.
But then what do you expect of some journos. (No offense to ALL journalists). They get paid to scare us, so that our Amygdala shrinks and we make hasty and wrong decisions, or simply freeze our brain's plasticity. Even if what I just assumed is unintentional, it still just as harmful.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with using scare as a tactic as long as a positive side is presented so that the brain sees a balance and the Amygdala doesn't shrink. But merely scaring people is unfair. It may even work as a Placebo and cause people to decline faster given that the newspaper already primed them for it. Smh.