Major health gains occurred between like 1820 and about 1950s, which is where is I would put the inflection point. Mostly due to public health(sanitation) and nutritional gains via an better understanding of the world. Interestingly, life expectancy has continued its march upwards. Not unlike when we went from being hunter gatherers to agriculturists. Life expectancy moved up, slowly over the years, but degenerative diseases became widespread, people became shorter, major tooth decay and all sorts of negative health trends started popping up.
Life expectancies went up from about 34 and marched forward until the late 18th century to the low 40s -then skyrocketed to over 70 by the 1950s – with massive improvements to public health.
Since then, as you note, obesity has been on the rise, but that is just a reflection of a larger trend all based on brain chemistry. Probably the most debilitating and expensive illness is depression, that has been on the rise since the early 50s. Rates of clinical depression have more than doubled since 1950. In US survey of over 18,000 adults found that a person born between 1945 and 1955 was between three and ten times more likely to suffer a major depression before the age of 34 than a person born between 1905 and 1914. Another American study involving 19,000 people found that 20% of the total US population suffer from a mental illness (as defined by the psychiatric bible The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) during any given 12 months and that 32% will suffer at some point during their lifetime. Along with these stress related illnesses comes the subsequent physical manifestations, mass addictions, debilitating anxiety, obesity, skyrocketing suicide rates, heart disease, cancers, incarceration rates, different types of public rage, etc. These trends have really went parabolic in the last two decades. The question to ask is what caused brian chemistry changes to cause all these stress related sicknesses. If these trajectories continue by 2030 75% of the population would be fat and depressed most of the time, along with a host of physical illnesses that come with it.
It’s obviously a trend that can’t continue – which brings us to the structural problems that are about to become front and center in the coming years. Which will force massive demographic shifts to poverty level subsistence and the associated social backlash.
