One of the few nice things about getting old is considering all the things that haven't happened... things that might have easily stopped the aging process long ago. Do you realize that the longer we live the longer we're expected to live?

When we're born, we're expected to live to age 77.3.
If we reach age 10, we're expected to live to age 77.9
By age 20, it's 78.2
By 30, it's 78.7
By 40 - 79.3
By 50 - 80.3
By 60 - 82
By 70 - 84.7
By 80 - 88.8
By 90 - 94.8
If you reach age 100, you're still expected to live another 2.7 years!

That's as far as the charts go, so I guess that 102.7 should be considered a maximum. Maybe there's a big hammer that falls at that point, or you get beamed up. I don't expect to find out.

At age 66, I guess I should expect to live another 17 years, except that if I last half that long (to age 75), I'll be expected to live to age 86. Makes you wonder how anyone ever actually dies. Maybe that explains how so many organizations claim so many "premature" deaths. As I read the charts, ANY death is a premature death. I know that whenever I die, my "cause of death", unless by accident, suicide, or murder, will be laid out as "premature death caused by smoking", even if I'm 120 at death.

I've been threatening to add up all the death claims being tossed at us... from smoking, drinking, eating fat, eating carbs, being slovenly, not seeing our gynecologist often enough, eating fried cinnamon rolls, drinking coffee, etc. I'm positive those claims, added together, are greater than the total number of people who actually die. Do some people get more than one cause of death? That must be why we have so many people trying to scare the bejeebers out of us with health claims.

I read a story this morning that brightened my day... about vaccines being genetically engineered into potatoes which can then deliver the vaccine instead of requiring an injection. If that really works out, it'll be a boon to distribution and immunization of vaccines. But then, as I thought about eating a chunk of potato, I remembered that potatoes without salt are really dull, and I then recalled the latest campaign by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. CSPI is one of those organizations that produces scary press releases the media loves, like this one: 'Forgotten Killer' Salt Kills 150,000 a Year, the title of their latest scare tactic

CSPI is filing a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in federal court to compel the agency to classify salt as a food additive. Presently, FDA classifies salt as GRAS, or Generally Recognized as Safe, which means that it is not closely regulated.

I think most of us realize by now just how effective the FDA is at regulating stuff to keep us safe. You bet... having the FDA regulate it will take care of the problem, alright. Yah, shure.

So... 150,000 of us die from salt. How does that compare with other causes of death? Here's a list from the CDC:

1. Heart Disease: 696,947
2. Cancer: 557,271
3. Stroke: 162,672
4. Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,816
5. Accidents (unintentional injuries): 106,742
6. Diabetes: 73,249
7. Influenza/Pneumonia: 65,681
8. Alzheimer's disease: 58,866
9. Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 40,974
10. Septicemia: 33,865

It appears that salt just became the 4th biggest killer, doesn't it? Well... there are causes and then there are CAUSES. There are medical problems, like those above, and there are "causes". You might think that doctors would concentrate on the medical problems, but here's a different list from the Journal of the American Medical Association:

Their leading causes of death (2000) were:

tobacco (435,000 deaths)
poor diet and physical inactivity (400,000 deaths),
alcohol consumption (85,000 deaths)
microbial agents (75,000)
toxic agents (55,000)
motor vehicle crashes (43,000)
incidents involving firearms (29,000)
sexual behaviors (20,000)
illicit use of drugs (17,000)

Some similar lists include suicide (30,000) and homicide (20,000)

If we're to believe that 435,000 people die from smoking now, that must have been the ONLY cause of death back a few decades, when over half our population smoked. That seems odd... I remember deaths from tuberculosis, polio, smallpox, and measles, which have been virtually eliminated. We drove unsafe cars, ate pesticides, drank cruddy water, used paint with lead, insulated with asbestos, had inefficient fumy furnaces, secondhand smoke everywhere, consumed calories by the thousands, and didn't have "freshness" dates on our foods. I don't know how we survived at all.

It's pretty apparent that we can indeed have more than one cause of death... I can die of cancer AND of smoking... or of a heart disease AND of boozing... or a stroke AND of sexual behavior. I might get lucky and put all those together at one time... and get counted as a dozen deaths. Now THAT would make life worth living!

I hope all this seems as silly to you as it does to me, but a lot of people take it seriously. They'll hear about the 150,000 deaths from salt and jump into a salt-free or reduced-salt diet... then worry about it and die from the stress. The uncomfortable fact is, though, that no matter what you do, you're going to die anyway. Does the cause really make any difference? Does trying to avoid unhealthy choices make a difference? It sure hasn't seemed to, in my experience. I've known people who really deserved to have died young but didn't (some would include me in that list), and I've known paragons of health who are long gone. Many of the world's oldest humans have been smokers and drinkers and ate "poorly". Exceptions? I really don't think so.

I've watched so many health scares come and go that I don't believe ANY of them. If scientists really have answers about avoiding death, they haven't convinced me. Sure, we're living longer, but there are also a lot more of us sitting in rest homes imitating kumquats. Is that progress?

I just took one life expectancy test that estimated mine at 53 years. Another one only gave me 42 years, but neither of these is too bright since they both asked my age, then ignored it or assumed I was taking the test from my grave.

Here's a better one that gives me 77.93 years, and tells me how I could increase that. For example, I answered that I sleep 5 hours/day, and it told me that if I slept 7 hours/day, I would gain 317.55 days. That means that if I sleep an extra 8,760 hours over the next 12 years, I'll live an extra 7,621 hours. I'll live longer, but I'll be asleep the whole extra time. The only category I scored well on was by answering that I didn't have sex, which got me congratulations and longer life... for avoiding AIDS.

As has seemed apparent all my life, if you really want to live longer, your best bet is to just try to avoid doing anything enjoyable... but don't let it stress or depress you, because that will kill you too. I'm really beginning to think there just isn't any way to avoid death, and that we should just accept it and ignore it. The clincher for me is that death is the only sure-fire way to stop the aging process.