It's almost certainly not medicine or nutrition. I know romanticising the advancement of humanity gives us a nerd-on but the reality is it's probably just that our grandparents lead gruelingly hard lives on average and that showed years on.
My grandpa was a coalman in his 20s and basically couldn't walk from his mid 70s as his knees were shot. His hip dislocated on average every few months toward the end as there was no muscle holding it in.
More outdoor jobs, and exposure to the sun ages the skin etc.
Gruelingly hard and unhealthy lives. Until relatively recently there was a very high likelihood that you were either a heavy smoker or lived most of your life inhaling a lot of secondhand smoke. There was also a boom in alcohol consumption in the post WW2 western world that lasted into the 1990s.
> Until relatively recently there was a very high likelihood that you were either a heavy smoker or lived most of your life inhaling a lot of secondhand smoke.
Heavy smoking was definitely a problem, as was air and general environmental pollution. Nutrition, too, has made a huge difference. I think that the role of emotional stress is under-appreciated. The Baby Boomers had happy childhoods. The Vietnam War killed .03% of the U.S. population at the time, and the survival of the U.S. was simply never in doubt. Their parents, OTOH, generally had miserable childhoods during the Great Depression, then WWII killed .3% of the population, and of course there were some concerns about the survival of the U.S.
‘Secondhand smoke’ is not actually a thing which has an effect. It’s a propaganda term which ought to be avoided. Old folks today — i.e., the ones who look so much younger than old folks a generation ago — spent their childhoods and adulthoods absolutely surrounded by cigarette smoke, and smoking bans came in far too late to have an effect this recently. Compare never-smoking Boomer children of heavy smokers today to never-smoking Boomer children of non-smokers: there’s no appreciable difference.
> ‘Secondhand smoke’ is not actually a thing which has an effect. It’s a propaganda term which ought to be avoided. Old folks today — i.e., the ones who look so much younger than old folks a generation ago — spent their childhoods and adulthoods absolutely surrounded by cigarette smoke, and smoking bans came in far too late to have an effect this recently. Compare never-smoking Boomer children of heavy smokers today to never-smoking Boomer children of non-smokers: there’s no appreciable difference.
Color me skeptical for a few reasons:
1. From what I understand the negative effects of air pollution more generally are pretty well documented at this point. Cigarette smoke is just one more source of particulate matter in the air which has those ill effects. Just one that was perpetually present at (more or less) all times everywhere.
2. Complete smoking bans are relatively new (although in some places going on 30 years old at this point) but restrictions on where you could smoke happened more gradually. Also the amount of smoke being inhaled by non-smokers is a function of how many smokers there are as well of rules about where you can smoke. The percentage of adults who smoke peeked in the early 1960s and started declining more rapidly in the early 1970s.
My grandpa was a coalman in his 20s and basically couldn't walk from his mid 70s as his knees were shot. His hip dislocated on average every few months toward the end as there was no muscle holding it in.
More outdoor jobs, and exposure to the sun ages the skin etc.