Baby Boomers Appear to Be Less Healthy Than Parents --WaPo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902458.html?referrer=email

Baby Boomers Appear to Be Less Healthy Than Parents

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 20, 2007; A01



As the first wave of baby boomers edges toward retirement, a growing body of evidence suggests that they may be the first generation to enter their golden years in worse health than their parents. While not definitive, the data sketch a startlingly different picture than the popular image of health-obsessed workout fanatics who know their antioxidants from their trans fats and look 10 years younger than their age.

Boomers are healthier in some important ways -- they are much less likely to smoke, for example -- but large surveys are consistently finding that they tend to describe themselves as less hale and hearty than their forebears did at the same age. They are more likely to report difficulty climbing stairs, getting up from a chair and doing other routine activities, as well as more chronic problems such as high cholesterol, blood pressure and diabetes.

"We're seeing some very powerful evidence all pointing to parallel findings," said Mark D. Hayward, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. "The trend seems to be that people are not as healthy as they approach retirement as they were in older generations. It's very disturbing."

While cautioning that the data are just starting to emerge, researchers say the findings track with several unhealthy trends, notably the obesity epidemic. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight, and those extra pounds make joints wear out more quickly, boost cholesterol and blood pressure, and raise the risk of a host of debilitating health problems. And despite all those gym memberships, baby boomers tend to be less physically active than their parents and grandparents, their daily routines often dominated by desk jobs and the drive to and from work.
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Ok. Now let's put this in context, shall we?


Boomers are a diverse group, and have been since the '60's. Conformity was not the norm, aside from a small and narrow group, which is just part of the mix.

Some Boomers tended to go to extremes-in either direction, and sometimes several.

A LOT of whining goes on in the Boomer cohorts. A LOT.

The economy has never been particularly kind to Boomers, who found themselves rationed out of just about everything, aside from the Clinton years.

The fitness fanatical are paying for the abuse of their joints. My neighbor's hip replacement (professional ballet dancer). The story of the woman crippled by Pilates overuse. The runners with blown knees. The cyclists, etc.

The hedonists are paying for the abuse of their bodies, too. The corpulent, the alcoholic, the smoker, the consumers of unnecessary drugs. Then there are the sexually daring, who contracted AIDS or other complications of experimentation.

The point is, instead of a generation marching in lockstep into the same patterns of behavior, the Boomers were all over the map. Even within a family, there would be massive variations. This simply didn't happen before.

And finally, medicine has started to become a service and a science and a commodity. Before, it used to be some basic first aid and a lot of compassion and prayer. This is why people want health care, and why it's so expensive, and why the elite don't want the masses to have access. It is the latest area of competition. The thought of Boomers actually having a right to something worth having just freaks some people out. (Usually that small group that conformed to parental practices).

And as to how people judge their health, the standards have changed.

My great-grandparents either died in their early old age (the men) or lived into their 90's.

My grandparents either died early due to abuse (drink, smoking, overweight) or lived to 90. (equality of the sexes in this generation)

My mother is dead of smoking, my father is 75 and complaining about how old he is. I expect, if he gets his blood pressure under control, he will do so for another 10-20 years. I know he misses my mother's influence on keeping him healthy, which is ironic. But that's the problem with an addiction that's too hard to fight.


It's all about lifestyle. The Boomers as a generation explored a lot of lifestyles, and had others forced upon them by a corrupt and greedy corporate/government cabal that believes in cheating and theft. They are the past generations, but magnified. And, as I said above, a lot louder about complaining.

era in which they grew up. The years following WWII saw both above ground nuclear testing and an explosion in petro-chemical technology. Remember the old saying "Better living through modern chemistry." Well maybe not or at least not in the long term.

The environmental insult replaced the traditional infectious disease/public sanitation insult around WWII. That significantly changed patterns of health around the world in ways that we are only beginning to examine and try to measure.

I am standing on my fence on this one. Gen. pop. lives longer.

afford health care/health insurance as their parents did.

God forbid we should develop a national policy to address it. Sigh.

"The economy has never been particularly kind to Boomers, who found themselves rationed out of just about everything, aside from the Clinton years."

Excellent insight. This is especially true of the masses of Boomers who were not privileged, did not come from the middle class, did not have everything handed to them by their parents. I was certainly not handed anything except, thankfully, a good primary and secondary education. I needed it to get by in the Carter, Ford, Reagan and Bush years. The Clinton years were the years when I finished my long-delayed college career, when I bought my tiny little house and my first good car, and started living instead of "getting by". They were the years when I finally cleared my debt (except for my mortgage, of course) and started thinking about putting aside for retirement, and maybe travelling abroad for the first time.

The Bush years are the years when I lost my job to offshoring (yes, the work went to India) when I became involuntarily semi-retired, underemployed, and had all my plans either radically altered or wiped away. Now, I'm just getting by; at least, though, I have my health (except for the Boomer complaints of Hypertension, and bad knees).

Beth Soldo of the Aging Research Center disagrees with you about the whining, though.
"As they age, they may be less tolerant of the changes they see -- minor pains, less stamina, muscle loss and strength," Soldo said. "I don't just think they are crybabies or whiners. I think there is a changing definition of what good health means."

Not all of us, but it's a well-developed skill.

As my family doc explained it to me, ten years ago my cholesterol levels (all 3) and blood sugar level were considered healthy and I got a clean bill of health. Now the numbers/ranges considered healthy have been recalculated downward by whatever powers in the medical community set them - so that with the SAME test results from my lab work, I'm "borderline" diabetic, high cholesterol, etc.

In other words, if my parents and I always had the same lab results, when they were my age some 30 years ago, they would have been considered to be in good health, while I - with the same results - am labeled as "borderline". Similarly, people in my parents' generation who would have been labeled "borderline", would by today's standards be labeled as positive for being diabetic, or having high cholesterol.

I do think that the massively increased amounts of chemicals/carcinogens in our environment has a negative impact on health - asthma being one obvious example. Similarly being overweight has many negative health impacts. But a part of the "surge" in poor health statistics is also a result of this recalibration of what lab test results are considered to indicate good health.

It's getting to be that NO ONE is "normal" in pregnancy any more. The urge to measure and calibrate, medicate and berate everyone has gone too far. The tolerable ranges are too narrow and rigid.

for risk of diabetes. I think the better way to tell is post-meal numbers (less than 180 2 hours after eating)since high readings then would be a marker for the improper functioning of insulin for whatever reason. Alot of medical testing pushed is just a big waste of money and docs love to go for the most expensive things sometimes.

You can find out with a simple $15-20 meter and test strips if they have sample strips inside(some do and some don't)

health insurance that our parents have had.

My parents and parents-in-law are in their late 80's and 90's. Three of them are alive today because of very complex expensive surgeries, repeated hospitalizations, massive medication use, and doctor-intensive chronic care. All of this is paid for by insurance, so that they never have to deal with a bill. Nobody I know has this kind of health insurance.

On the other hand, I do NOT want to live the way they are living in my last decade. They are technically alive, but it doesn't look like health to me. I really do hope I die before I get THAT old.

The oldest tactic of class warfare.

Medical treatment is a classic situation of bullying people "for their own good", always has been. Since it has become a big source of profit too, this has only become more common. Various politicians are advancing plans to force everyone to pay for medical "insurance", but those same people would go bonkers if it were suggested that everyone should just pay taxes into a federal public health system. Meanwhile it is common to treat political intransigents as though they were "sick", since that circumvents criminal process and de-legitimizes whatever they have to say, and that was something we used to rag on the Soviets for doing.

But I believe this 100%. I am in my late 50's--my mom is in her early 80's. When she was my age almost all of her friends were alive. I have already lost a number of friends and have many friends living with cancer today. Her friends who are just starting to die in the last few years are dying from old age! I also have way more friends with joint replacements than she does! I definitely advocate being a couch potato.

The human physique has undertaken punishing labor ever since civilization began. However, I wonder if all the joint and hip problems have to do with the way we undertake physical activity today:

Most of us sit at desks, then three or four times a week (or more) engage in physical activity that is meant to burn off a lot of calories. We put a lot of stress on joints that aren't much used the rest of the time.
Our forefathers, however, probably burned more calories over the course of one day than we do in three sessions on the treadmill. Think about it: they chopped wood, hauled water, hung clothes, beat rugs, kneaded bread, walked to work (to buildings that offtime didn't have an elevator) and walked to shop. Physical activity was built into one's day, while today we have to create it.