Will we die before our parents?
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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello, this is More or Less, the programme about numbers on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. On this week's programme, has the promise of a bonus incentivised players to do better in the World Cup?
But first... We, the adults of the last four generations, have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents because of the landscape of food that we've built around them. The youngest generation is on track for the first time in this nation's history of being less healthy, having a shorter lifespan than their parents.
The claim here is that this generation may die at an earlier age than their parents as a consequence of childhood obesity. Our reporter Laura Gray has been looking into this.
Laura, is it really true? While it's true that the number of people who are obese and suffering from obesity-related illnesses is higher for this generation than previous ones, death rates from heart attacks and strokes, which are illnesses often associated with obesity, are actually going down steeply, as Sir Richard Peto, Professor of Medical Statistics at the University of Oxford in England, explains.
If you take Britain as an example, sure, people are getting fatter here, and that's a bad thing. But if you go back 30 years, then the chances that we'd die from heart attacks, stroke, you know, diseases like that in middle age was 16% at 1980 death rates, and it's 4% at 2010 death rates. So the probability of dying from heart attacks or strokes, vascular disease, the sorts of things that get caused by being overweight, has gone down by a factor of 4%.
Well, that's surprising, but he's talking there about Britain. Is the trend the same in other parts of the world?
The trend is the same. Mexico is now the fattest country in the world and even there people are less likely to die earlier.
The probability of dying before you're 70, if you go back to 1970 in Mexico, it was a half and now it's a quarter.
Fascinating. So although obesity causes cardiovascular problems, fewer people are dying from these problems and people in general are living longer than they used to.
And this is partly because the treatment for heart-related problems is now so much better than in the past. Also paradoxically, research in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that being overweight may actually lead to a longer life. While obese people may die earlier than people of normal weight, overweight people may live longer than people with a normal body weight. And this is called the obesity paradox. Well, how does that work? The authors of the report suggest it's possible that overweight people get better medical care, either because they show symptoms of disease earlier or because they're screened more regularly for chronic diseases stemming from their weight, such as diabetes or heart problems.
And there's also some evidence that heavier people may be more likely to survive certain operations. So you should worry if you're obese, but worry less if you're a bit overweight?
According to this research, yes. And taking weight out of the equation, is this generation today likely to die at a younger age than previous ones?
Unlikely. Fat or not, around the world we're likely to live longer than our parents, as Richard Peto explains.
Could this generation really have a shorter lifespan because of childhood obesity?
If you're not in the middle of a war, if you're not in the middle of an HIV epidemic, if you're not drinking gallons of vodka, then overall death rates are going down and they're going down very fast. The probability of dying before 50 worldwide now is half what it was 40 years ago. In some countries like Iran, it's gone from 36% down to 6%, much better than half. And some countries like the Congo, for example, where there's just chronic war, it hasn't changed very much.
And so what explains this overall very significant drop in death rates?
There isn't one explanation. Better vaccination programmes and drugs, cleaner water, controlled infections, trained midwives and people stopping smoking are all contributing factors.
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