Spotty Research

I really hate spotty research. You know the kind. When someone takes a couple numbers or facts and interprets them in ways that are so blatantly wrong that even an amateur student of history can see it.

Alan and I were watching a show on the History channel about the development of cereal grains as staples of the modern diet. It was all a bit hyperbolic, but the one thing that really bothered me was the section in which they claimed cereal saved our lives. Their "expert" claimed that the average life expectancy in the 1800’s was 40 and that by age 20 a person was considered middle-aged. That the elderly were essentially non-existent. The program went on to represent that the American diet was to blame, specifically our breakfasts of eggs, sausage, and bacon. And that the introduction of cereal as a "health food" in the early 20th century by the Kellogg brothers was a major factor in the increase of life expectancy. Ergo, cereal saved our lives. This is just so effing ridiculous that I can’t stand it.

First off, the idea that 20 was middle aged is nonsense. If that were actually true, girls would be expected to marry and begin producing children shortly after their first period, and they most certainly weren’t. Twenty was a perfectly accepted age for a woman to still be unmarried. The actual cause of the short life expectancy is the fact that 1 in 5 children born alive died before the age of one and another 20% never reached adulthood. One in eight women died in childbirth. No matter how big your random sample, having more than 50% of your population dying before the age of say, 32, is going to seriously fuck with your averages. Give me 10 random ages of death, keeping in mind those few parameters and I’ll give you a very short life expectancy. Let’s say our infants died at 3 months and 9 months. That’s 0.25 and 0.75. Next we have a child who caught influenza and died at 10 and her sister who died in the same mini-epidemic at age 16. One of these 10 people is a mother who dies in childbirth at age 29. Let’s round it out with people in their 50’s through mid 70’s. So…

1. 0.25
2. 0.75
3. 10
4. 16
5. 29
6. 67
7. 65
8. 52
9. 72
10. 69

Anybody do the math yet? That works out to an average life expectancy of only 38.1, which is right on track for what we would expect to find in 1850 (average life expectancy was 38.3). That means that if a person made it past childhood and giving birth, he or she could reasonably expect to live into their 60’s and maybe even their 70’s if they were lucky. Plenty of children grew up knowing their grandparents.

As for the American breakfast being a major factor in the low life expectancy, that makes me so mad I could spit. We’re talking about a time when hygiene was an afterthought and people thought diseases were caused by bad air and that strategic bleeding cured everything. Infectious disease was the major cause of death. It’s obvious even in older cemeteries. You see clusters of deaths within a few months of one year as a single disease swept through a town. Go one town over and you’re likely to see that same cluster overlapping with the first. It was breakthroughs in medical technology, coupled with new understanding of how diseases spread and how to prevent them through sanitation and personal hygiene that increased our lifespan. It hasn’t been until modern times that diet has actually been considered a factor in our mortality. Or does anyone really think there were a lot of farmers dropping dead of heart attacks at age 30?

Grains and cereal are also extremely cheap and can be stored for long periods of time, unlike meat and eggs. Things like bread and oatmeal would have been major components of every meal, especially for the lower classes who couldn’t afford meat at every meal. A farmer who slaughtered a few hogs every year had to make that meat last, so his wife would have done her best to stretch it by adding grains and vegetables. Yes, the poor may have been malnourished. Even the rich had room for improvement. But it wasn’t because they were bursting with protein. It was because food that spoils like meat, fruit, and vegetables were hard to get year round. It was the improvement in food storage and refrigeration that helped improve our diets and increase our lifespans.

Sorry for the rant and the perhaps unwanted history lesson, but it really bugged the hell out of me to hear them make such outrageous claims in favor of something that, while it has been a major factor in making our society what it is, hasn’t necessarily made us any healthier. Agriculture and the resulting population densities and close contact with animals have led to disease vectors that were virtually unknown in hunter-gatherer societies. I have always been interested in disease and where it comes from and its impact on human populations, so seeing something like this just pissed me off.

Again, sorry for the rant.

~Liz

*edit* It was the Discovery Channel, not the History Channel