Span of Life

      I have become convinced that an ultra-low-carb lifestyle will result in a significant increase in lifespan for those who stick with it.  And it will be an increased lifespan almost by default.  By that I mean if you are not beset by any of the panorama of chronic conditions abetted by the catastrophically awful Standard American Diet, then of course you are going to live longer.  Almost all of those chronic autoimmune conditions are ultimately deadly.  They kill millions of people each year, which drags down the average lifespan of the population.  Which, after decades of increasing average lifespans, are once again on the decline. And that decline includes the many surgical and chemical interventions that were responsible for the rise in the first place.  It is more than fair to say that we are in the middle of an epidemic of chronic metabolic malfunctions.

     Without those medical interventions the average lifespan would not be merely in decline, but in free fall.  What is most certainly true is that the population's level of suffering has steadily increased despite all the drugs and surgeries thrown at the problem.  For instance.  Deaths from heart disease have, until recently, been on the decline, but the incidence of heart disease has increased substantially.  The same can be said for almost all other autoimmune conditions, which include diabetes, psoriasis, arthritis, Chrone's disease, IBS, cognitive decline, and Alzheimer's to name but a few.  All of which, and I do mean all, have a direct causal relationship with our excremental carbage saturated lifestyles.  And they all produce physical, and mental, suffering that would test the patience of Saint Bernadette.

     I would not be the least bit surprised to see in the coming years that ultra-low-carb eaters' lifespans increase substantially.  Baring the usual caveat of being hit by a bus, or having some other kind of fatal accident, lifespans could easily exceed a century or more.  There is a term of art in the low-carb community known as "healthspan".  Which means the amount of time you are metabolically and mentally healthy.  Again by default, if you have an increased health span you will ipso facto have an increased lifespan.  The biggest problem with this scenario will be the psychic pain induced by watching your age cohort dropping like flies far sooner than necessary because of their wretched dietary haabits.  

     No one wants to live to, or past, a hundred as a cognitively challenged, immobile, and pharmaceutically dependent lump of senile nursing home protoplasm.  Conversely, everyone would like to live past a hundred if they are metabolically and mentally healthy, active, and not in a nursing home drooling into their Ensure and swallowing twenty pills a day.  Such is now within our grasp.