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Health and Age
Saturday was “World Health Day” – it was also – not coincidentally – the day the World Health Organisation (WHO) was founded. While there have been many quibbles about the UN as a whole, few question the seminal role of the WHO in fulfilling its mandate to improve health in the world.
This year the theme is on “Ageing and health” with the slogan “Good health adds life to years’. And we can see the evidence of the slogan all around us.
In Guyana, life expectancy at birth is now 69 years – a full decade more than it was just two decades ago. And we can see where we are headed. In the developed countries, life expectancy has continued a seeming inexorable climb upwards.
Sweden predicts that in a few years theirs will be an incredible 100 years – way past the ‘three score and ten’ of the Bible. The ancient Hindus had always measured the normal human lifespan as 100 years.
By 2050, the WHO estimates that there will be almost 400 million people age 80 and older — compared to about 14 million people in that age group around 1950. “We’ve come a long way, baby.”
In Guyana, as a composite people dragged from various continents and dumped here to work on plantations, old age was considered as a curse by the ruling class – since that meant they had to ‘carry’ non-productive assets. That is what we were – assets judged by our ability for production.
Even in the so called ‘developed’ world, which all not so incidentally graduated to that state on the backs of our labour, there is a persistence of the notion that one is judged by one’s ‘productive’ capacity. The production is invariably material.
One of the goals of the WHO’s campaign this year is to challenge this stereotype about older people and also others such as that they are not ‘attractive’ and they cannot ‘do anything” – even playing and having ‘fun’.
Intriguingly enough, in both African and Indian traditions from which most of our people were conscripted, older folks were revered as repositories of wisdom, which was considered as the most valuable possession of their civilisations.
In the development of the west and its ascendancy, the “culture of youth” has become dominant and the “old” must furiously try to keep ‘looking’ young – often with the ‘help’ of plastic surgery and botox injections.
The WHO is stressing a whole new perspective on aging: good health practiced can add years to one’s life but ‘life to one’s years”. Meaning that, the older person should be able to be a functional member of society for all his life. Not to be shoved off into the background.
More than anything, modern science has demonstrated that good health in general has a great deal to do with good eating practices. While there has been a great focus on the need of better medical services to care for an increasingly aged society, the point is that those services can be minimised if the health problems are avoided in the first case.
There needs to be a much more vigorous educational program by the Ministry of Health of what constitutes ‘good nutrition”. We had editorialised recently about the benefits of using ‘brown rice’ over ‘white rice’.
This emphasis on good eating habits must begin as early as possible: even when the child is in the mother’s womb. It appears that while we are young, our body can withstand the depredations of bad diet but these accumulate and become overwhelming later. Refraining from smoking and maintaining reasonable physical activity can make a major difference in the later years.
The other cost-free difference we can make to older people immediately without spending an extra penny, is to return to our traditional practice of giving respect to them. It is said that a mind is a terrible thing to waste; but think of how more terrible it is to waste a mind that is filled with experience and wisdom.
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