Modern crises: pensions, obesity and the myth of living longer

There are so many crises in society today it’s hard to know which one to fret about most. One that really intrigues me at the moment is the furore over changes to the state pension age, which is due to increase to 67 between 2026 and 2028. Politicians justify this extension of misery with the rather worn refrain ‘we are living longer than ever.’ I’m starting to think that longevity is a crisis in itself.

No one challenges this assertion, and why would anyone? Statistics do indeed support this claim. In August 2011 the Department for Work and Pensions released a report which detailed how life expectancy has rocketed. According to the data, which include predictions made by the Office for National Statistics, twenty year-olds today are twice as likely as their parents to reach the age of 100 – and three times more likely than their grandparents. According to these predictions, by 2066 there will be more than half a million people in the UK aged 100 or more. What with so many people getting to be so old, the Department for Work and Pensions is clearly worried about having so many folk not working but claiming a pension.

There’s a great big hole in the logic of these predictions. Those making them, over at the Office for National Statistics, might want to set up some cross-departmental meetings with their colleagues in the data on chronic diseases section. Today’s elders, on which these stats are based, were born in the 1920s to 1940s. Unlike so many of today’s more youthful generation, they were not reared on a diet of crisps, sugary biscuits, fizzy drinks, or any other heinous processed junk. They ate, in the main, plain, simple but natural food – meat and veg. They were physically active and not given to overeating, as there generally wasn’t enough to overeat. You simply cannot extrapolate data from today’s elderly population and apply it to people born in the 1980s onwards, when junk food became widely available and obesity common. Other predictions may be more relevant: it is also predicted, by the National Heart Forum, that by 2020, 41% of men and 36% of women aged 20-65 will be obese. Obese people do not go on to celebrate their 100^th birthdays. They do not go on to enjoy a long and happy retirement. Instead, they go on to develop heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.

Whilst I’m on a doomsday roll, I might add that other predictions are looking equally as dire. Those same children reared on a fast-food diet have gone on to become parents now themselves. And this much we know: what a mother eats directly affects the health of her child – not just for nine months in the womb but for the rest of that child’s life. This observation was first made by Professor David Barker in what is now famously known as the Barker hypothesis. Heart disease and diabetes are two conditions which may result from poor nutrition in the womb.

The problem of how the Government is going to pay an ageing population a reasonable pension may have already, tragically, solved itself.