[throwaway202022]

> We're looking for reasons why we feel sick all the time but the reality is beyond basic things like being too fat and too sedentary, we are healthier than ever, and many many people had wretched miserable lives of chronic pain before modernity. The expectation of health is a modern conceit and this research is just a reflection of the constant anxiety that there is something wrong with us all - a cultural hypochondria.

Aside from things like infectious diseases, we're not healthier than ever. We have better medicine than ever, but disease states that were once rarities have become commonplace in our modern world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_disease

By the way, these are diseases which cannot all be blamed on "being too fat and too sedentary", as even skinny people can develop type 2 diabetes. Unheard of centuries ago.

[wizofaus]

This is true, but lifestyle diseases are somewhat easier to avoid than infectious diseases (plus all the various other things that could easily kill you in your first decade or so in bygone eras). I'd almost say lifestyle diseases seem to be, to a large degree, a choice - maybe not directly, but as a society we accept that if we want to enjoy all the privileges of modern technology and food availability etc., then we pay for it with heart disease or diabetes or certain cancers etc.

[throwaway202022]

> I'd almost say lifestyle diseases seem to be, to a large degree, a choice - maybe not directly, but as a society we accept that if we want to enjoy all the privileges of modern technology and food availability etc., then we pay for it with heart disease or diabetes or certain cancers etc.

It's a choice for many, but I think it's not a fully informed one. If I'd known in my teens and early twenties what I know now, there is a zero percent chance I would have eaten and lived the way that I did. These things don't seem to hit people until the point that their personal health is affected, and sometimes not even then.

[wizofaus]

Seems to me the same way we treat environmental damage, though in that case most of the suffering will fall on our kids and grandkids. But even the choices young adults are making today aren't really compatible with having a decent planet to live on in 60 years or so, barring some technological miracles.