Originally Posted by
rickair7777
Yes, I seriously doubt, without even trying to google it, that the majority of males died in their mid-40's.
If you survived early childhood, you had the potential to to live to a ripe old age. They also benefited from healthy living... organic food, lots of exercise. Yeah they had booze and tobacco but so do we.
If you're looking for actual life expectancy of 40-something, you need to go back to 10,000+ years to the hunter-gatherer era.
There has been a major spike upwards in life expectancy in the last 25 or so years. I believe that a big driver of this is due to anti smoking campaigns. Smoking actually saved Social Security money due to earlier deaths due to lung cancer. Would we actually be willing to bring back tobacco advertising on TV? I remember one ad where they had somebody dressed up as a doctor telling us that smoking was healthy.
Joe