40 Startling Factoids About Health, the Body, What We Eat, and the American Medical System

As someone who is very interested in health, I’ve read an awful lot of books about health, fitness, exercise, medicine, and longevity. Over the course of reading those books, I’ve come across a lot of extraordinary facts and stories that you will find extremely interesting. The only caveat I would give you about this is that although these are all reputable sources, any topic that involves health can be controversial. I did my best to stay away from the more hotly disputed topics, but good luck putting anything out that everyone agrees with these days. In any case, enjoy!

1) "If you want to imagine what a disease might do if it became bad in every possible way, you could do no better than consider the case of smallpox. Smallpox is almost certainly the most devastating disease in the history of humankind. It infected nearly everyone who was exposed to it and killed about 30 percent of victims. The death toll in the twentieth century alone is thought to have been around 500 million. Smallpox’s astounding infectiousness was vividly demonstrated in Germany in 1970 after a youthful tourist developed it upon returning home from a trip to Pakistan. He was placed in hospital quarantine but opened his window one day to sneak a cigarette. This, it has been reported, was enough to infect seventeen others, some two floors away." -- The Body: A Guide for Occupants

2) "In medieval times, one-third of Europe’s population was decimated by the bubonic plague. Within a few centuries of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas had been wiped out by smallpox, measles, influenza, and other germs brought in by European invaders and colonists. More people died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic than were killed in the trenches of World War I. Malaria, presently among the most deadly infectious agents on the planet, is arguably the greatest mass murderer of all time. Experts estimate the disease has killed half of all people who have roamed the planet since the Stone Age." -- This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

3) "As has been true for virtually every vaccine ever made, the first vaccines aren’t always the best, safest, and last. For example, a live, weakened polio vaccine introduced in 1963 was replaced by an inactivated polio vaccine in 2000, when it became clear that the former actually caused polio in eight to ten US children every year. The first measles vaccine in 1963—which caused a high rate of fever and rash—was replaced by a safer, better vaccine in 1968. Another measles vaccine, which was also introduced in 1963, was taken off the market when it was found to actually increase the risk of pneumonia. The first rubella (German measles) vaccine in 1969, which caused arthritis in small joints like fingers and wrists, was replaced by a safer vaccine in 1979. The Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccine in 1985, a bacterial vaccine that wasn’t particularly effective in young children, was replaced by a far more effective one in 1987. And the first shingles vaccine in 2011, designed to prevent one of the most debilitatingly painful diseases, was replaced by a much better one in 2017." -- You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

4) "In the 1920s heart disease was rare in the United States. The American Heart Association was quite a small entity, and there were not many cardiologists because they simply weren’t needed." -- Understanding the Heart: Surprising Insights into the Evolutionary Origins of Heart Disease—and Why It Matters

5) "Early descriptions from 1923 suggest that cancer was essentially nonexistent among the Inuit; a 1949 report uncovered only fourteen cases of cancer in a ten-year span." -- The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

6) "In the United States in 1900, life expectancy at birth was 46 years for a man and 48 years for a woman, due largely to high infant and childhood mortality. But those who survived childhood had a good chance of surviving to older age. The top three causes of death in 1900 were all infectious diseases: pneumonia, tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal infections." -- The Longevity Solution: Rediscovering Centuries-Old Secrets to a Healthy, Long Life

7) "The first shoes are only about ten thousand years old and were made from cured animal skins. While sandals have been around for at least half that time, only in the past few hundred years have we seen the modern shoe come into its own: stiff soles and uppers that force the foot into an unnatural position." -- The Big Book of Health and Fitness: A Practical Guide to Diet, Exercise, Healthy Aging, Illness Prevention, and Sexual Well-Being

8) "One intriguing paradox of reproduction is that women are having babies later but preparing for it earlier. The age of first menstruation for women has fallen from fifteen in the late nineteenth century to just twelve and a half today, at least in the West. That is almost certainly because of improved nutrition. But what cannot be explained is that the rate has accelerated even further in more recent years. Just since 1980, the age of puberty has fallen in America by eighteen months. About 15 percent of girls now begin puberty by age seven. That could be a reason for alarm. According to the Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, evidence suggests that the prolonged exposure to estrogen substantially increases the risk of breast and uterine cancer in later life." -- The Body: A Guide for Occupants

9) "In 1982, 71 percent of men and 54 percent of women had been smokers. Today, only 12 percent of people are smokers, and it’s falling further."

10) "In the 1950s, for the equivalent of a billion dollars in today’s money, you could develop about ninety drugs. Today, for the same money, you can develop on average just one-third of a drug. In consequence, all but two of the eighteen largest pharmaceutical companies in the world have given up the search for new antibiotics. People take antibiotics for only a week or two. Much better to focus on drugs like statins or antidepressants that people can take more or less indefinitely. ‘No sane company will develop the next antibiotic,’ Kinch says." -- The Body: A Guide for Occupants

11) "In the book Putting Meat on the American Table, researcher Roger Horowitz scours the literature for data on how much meat Americans actually ate. A survey of eight thousand urban Americans in 1909 showed that the poorest among them ate 136 pounds a year, and the wealthiest more than 200 pounds. A food budget published in the New York Tribune in 1851 allots two pounds of meat per day for a family of five. Even slaves at the turn of the eighteenth century were allocated an average of 150 pounds of meat a year. As Horowitz concludes, ‘These sources do give us some confidence in suggesting an average annual consumption of 150–200 pounds of meat per person in the nineteenth century.’ About 175 pounds of meat per person per year! Compare that to the roughly 100 pounds of meat per year that an average adult American eats today. And of that 100 pounds of meat, more than half is poultry—chicken and turkey—whereas, until the mid-twentieth century, chicken was considered a luxury meat, on the menu only for special occasions (chickens were valued mainly for their eggs). Subtracting out the poultry factor, we are left with the conclusion that per capita consumption of red meat today is about 40 to 70 pounds per person, according to different sources of government data—in any case far less than what it was a couple of centuries ago." -- The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

12) "By 2020, for the first time, there will be more people on earth over the age of 65 than under the age of five. Two-thirds of those who have ever reached the age of 65 in the history of the world, are currently alive." -- Juvenescence: Investing in the age of longevity

13) "Today, 67 percent of the food calories consumed by kids in the US come from ultra-processed foods." -- Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs

14) "Sugar consumption has increased from 10 pounds per person a year in 1800 to 152 pounds per person each year." -- Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life

15) "A Kushi Institute analysis of nutrient data from 1975 to 1997 found that average calcium levels in 12 fresh vegetables dropped 27 percent; iron levels 37 percent; vitamin A levels 21 percent, and vitamin C levels 30 percent. A similar study of British nutrient data from 1930 to 1980, published in the British Food Journal, found that in 20 vegetables the average calcium content had declined 19 percent; iron 22 percent; and potassium 14 percent." -- From Sick To Superhuman: The Ultimate Biological Optimization Blueprint

16) "Thirty years ago, it took twelve weeks for a factory-farmed chicken to reach its slaughter weight, but now it only takes five to six weeks. Broiler chickens are three times higher in fat today than they were when I was born, and the standard factory-farmed turkey now has such an obese chest that it can barely stand." -- Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs

17) "More than 84,000 new chemicals have been introduced into commercial products and have found their way into our water, air, and food since 1900, including pesticides, herbicides, plastics, flame retardants, phthalates, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, bisphenols, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and heavy metals including arsenic, lead, and mercury—to name just a few." -- Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life

18) "After all, in countries with reasonably accurate birth and death records, life expectancy grew by only 3% between 1500 and 1700, 8% between 1700 and 1800, 9% between 1800 and 1900, and then by an amazing 42% between 1900 and 2000." -- Juvenescence: Investing in the age of longevity

19) "Perhaps no statistic to do with our increasing mass is more telling than that the average woman in the United States today weighs as much as the average man weighed in 1960. In that half a century or so, the average woman’s weight has gone from 140 pounds to 166 pounds. The man’s has gone from 166 to 196." -- The Body: A Guide for Occupants

20) "Until 1964, the official guidance in the United States was for thirty-two hundred calories per day for a moderately active man and twenty-three hundred for a similarly disposed woman. Today those inputs have been reduced to about twenty-six hundred calories for a moderately active man and two thousand for a moderately active woman. That’s a big reduction. Over the course of a year, for a man that would be almost a quarter of a million fewer calories. It probably won’t come as a surprise to hear that in fact, the inputs have gone in exactly the other direction. Americans today consume about 25 percent more calories than they did in 1970 (and, let’s face it, we weren’t exactly going without in 1970)." -- The Body: A Guide for Occupants

21) "Between 1960 and 1980, the percentage of obese American adults went up only slightly, from 13.4 to 15 percent. But from 1980 to 2016, the rate of obesity increased from 15 to 39.8 percent. Today, no other country in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)* has a higher obesity rate; ours is fully twice the average of the other countries. And it continues to grow: by 2030 almost half of American adults (48.9 percent) will be obese." -- Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It

22) "Fifty years ago, one in every eight or nine Americans would have been officially considered obese, and today it’s one in every three." -- Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

23) "In a study of 2,110 adults followed for almost eleven years, published in the premier medical journal JAMA, adults who got at least 7,000 steps per day had a 50 to 70 percent lower risk of dying during the follow-up period than those getting fewer than 7,000 steps per day. Other studies have shown similar findings: data from 6,355 men and women followed for an average of ten years showed that those who walked 8,000 to 12,000 steps per day had a 50 to 65 percent lower risk of death than those who took fewer than 4,000 steps per day." -- Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health

24) "The five main causes of death in older adults are: cardiovascular malfunction, cancer, pulmonary malfunction, neurodegeneration, and type 2 diabetes – are the main causes of death in older adults. Every day, across the world, about 160,000 people die, and 70% of them expire in older age because of one of those disease categories." -- Juvenescence: Investing in the age of longevity

25) "Published in 2022, just four years later, another large study found that fewer than 7 percent of Americans are metabolically healthy, in other words, have normal blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and weight, and have not had a heart attack or stroke!" -- Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life

26) "According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only about 23 out of each 100,000 people reach birthday number 100." -- The Big Book of Health and Fitness: A Practical Guide to Diet, Exercise, Healthy Aging, Illness Prevention, and Sexual Well-Being

27) "The average American over sixty-five sees twenty-eight doctors in their lifetime. Fourteen prescriptions are written per American per year." -- Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health

28) "Recently, scientists in the Netherlands unearthed an X-ray machine similar to those used in the early 1900s. They found that the amount of radiation emitted was 1,500 times greater than that to which patients are exposed today. Also, where exposure times in the early 1900s ranged from ten minutes to several hours, exposure times today are about twenty milliseconds (thousandths of a second). And, unlike the early days of X-ray technology, medical technicians now leave the room before turning on the machine. Between 1896 and 1930, tens of thousands of radiologists, technicians, and patients suffered burns, hair loss, and bone pain; thousands lost fingers, hands, and arms; and hundreds died from cancer." -- You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

29) "When Dr. Banting discovered insulin in 1921, he licenced the drug to pharmaceutical companies without a patent because he fervently believed this life-saving miracle should be made available to everybody who needed it. Yet, insulin—now available in many different formulations—is estimated to have cost the U.S. health care system $6 billion in 2012,4 driven in part by steep price increases. Between 2010 and 2015, these newer insulins increased in price from 168 to 325 percent. In 2013, Lantus, a long-acting form of insulin, earned $7.6 billion, making it the world’s bestselling diabetes drug. Various other insulins took another six of the top ten spots on that list." -- The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally

30) "Paul Dawson, a professor of food science at Clemson University in South Carolina, has made something of a career of studying the ways people spread bacteria from themselves to other surfaces, as when they share a water bottle or engage in ‘double dipping’ with chips and salsa. In a study called ‘Bacterial Transfer Associated with Blowing Out Candles on a Birthday Cake,’ Dawson’s team found that a candle blowing across a cake increased the coverage of bacteria on it by up to 1,400 percent, which sounds pretty horrifying but is in fact probably not much worse than the kinds of exposures we encounter in normal life anyway." -- The Body: A Guide for Occupants

31) "In his book Into the Gray Zone, Owen discusses the case of a patient named Amy who suffered a serious head injury in a fall and for years lay in a hospital bed. Using an fMRI scanner, and carefully watching the woman’s neural responses when researchers asked her a series of questions, they were able to determine that she was fully conscious. ‘She had heard every conversation, recognised every visitor, and listened intently to every decision being made on her behalf.’ But she was unable to move a muscle—to open her eyes, scratch an itch, express any desire. Owen believes that something in the region of 15 to 20 percent of people thought to be in a permanent vegetative state are in fact fully aware. Even now the only certain way to tell if a brain is working is if its owner says it is." -- The Body: A Guide for Occupants

32) "For example, in 1966, a survey of high school girls found that 50 percent of them believed they were too fat. Three years later, in 1969, 80 percent thought they were too fat. (In reality, only 15 percent of them were even slightly overweight in medical terms.) What changed? In 1966, a seventeen-year-old model named Lesley Hornby was suddenly and sensationally declared to be the new paragon of female beauty. She was announced as ‘the face of 1966’ by the fashion press and became better known as Twiggy. She weighed 91 pounds. After her rise to fame, fashion models shrank—and women’s hatred of their own bodies increased." -- Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs

33) "If a thousand people over the age of seventy-five without a history of cardiovascular disease are treated with a statin for one year, 999 will derive no demonstrated benefit and will be exposed to the risk of side effects. This is how distorted our health care has become: Despite the absence of data showing that statin treatment in elderly patients without heart disease provides significant benefit, the percentage of Americans without cardiovascular disease age seventy-nine and older taking a statin more than tripled between 2000 and 2012, from 8.8 to 34.1 percent." -- Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It

34) "But perhaps the most extraordinary case of unappeasable suffering concerned a patient known as M., a Massachusetts woman in her late thirties who developed an irresistible itch on her upper forehead following a bout of shingles. The itch became so maddening that she rubbed the skin completely away over a patch of scalp about an inch and a half in diameter. Medications didn’t help. She rubbed the spot especially furiously while asleep—so much so that one morning she awoke to find a trickle of cerebrospinal fluid running down her face. She had scratched through the skull bone and into her own brain. Today, more than a dozen years later, she is reportedly able to manage the scratch without doing severe damage to herself, but the itch has never gone away. What is most puzzling is that she has destroyed virtually all the nerve fibers in that patch of skin, yet the maddening itch remains." -- The Body: A Guide for Occupants

35) "Fasting has no upper limit. In the 1970s, a twenty-seven-year-old Scottish man started fasting at a weight of 456 pounds. Over the next 382 days, he subsisted on only noncaloric fluids, a daily multivitamin, and various supplements, setting the world record for the longest fast. A physician monitored him during the fasting period and determined that there were no significant deleterious health effects. His body weight decreased from 456 pounds to 180 pounds. Even five years after his fast, he remained at 196 pounds. His blood sugar level decreased but remained well within the normal range, and he had no episodes of hypoglycemia." -- The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended

36) "Some years ago, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine, Elizabeth Loftus, discovered that it is possible through suggestion to implant entirely false memories in people’s heads—to convince them that they were traumatically lost in a department store or shopping mall when they were small or that they were hugged by Bugs Bunny at Disneyland—even though these things never happened. (Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character and has never been at Disneyland.) She could show many people pictures of themselves as a child in which the image had been manipulated to make them look as if they were in a hot-air balloon, and often the subjects would suddenly remember the experience and excitedly describe it, even though in each case it was known that it had never happened. Now, you might think that you could never be that suggestible, and you would probably be right—only about one-third of people are that gullible—but other evidence shows that we all sometimes completely misrecall even the most vivid events." -- The Body: A Guide for Occupants

37) "The longest anyone has intentionally gone without sleep was in December 1963 when a seventeen-year-old high school student in San Diego named Randy Gardner managed to stay awake for 264.4 hours (11 days and 24 minutes) as part of a school science project. The first few days were comparatively easy for him, but gradually he became irritable and confused until his entire existence was a kind of hallucinatory blur. When he finished the project, Gardner fell into bed and slept for 14 hours. ‘I remember when I woke up, I was groggy, but not any groggier than a normal person,’ he told an NPR interviewer in 2017. His sleep patterns returned to normal, and he suffered no noticeable ill effects." -- The Body: A Guide for Occupants

38) "In a remote corner of Ecuador lives a community of about three hundred members known as the Laron dwarves, established in the fifteenth century by a group of Jews fleeing the persecution of the Spanish Inquisition. Geographic isolation produced inbreeding that led to the overexpression of rare genes—known in biology as the founder effect. In this case, the Laron dwarves are believed to have all descended from a single common ancestor, as they carry a shared rare mutation leading to short stature or dwarfism. Their average height is only four feet, but they are otherwise typically formed. Remarkably, this group appears to be completely immune to cancer!" -- The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

39) "The oldest organisms whose lives can be measured are generally trees. For instance, the Huon Pine colony (a ‘clonal’ colony) in Tasmania is about 10,000 years old, and individual trees are as much as 3,000 years old. Among animals that are sexually reproducing, Adwaita, a giant tortoise, died in India in 2006 at an estimated 255 years old. Jonathan, another tortoise who lives in the Seychelles, is thought to be about 184 years old. The tuatara lizard can live to well over 100, and one of them, Henry from New Zealand, only recently mated for the first time at 111 years old. He and his 80-year-old ‘wife’ now have 11 offspring. In addition, Ming, an ocean-going quahog (basically a clam), has been measured to be 507 years old." -- Juvenescence: Investing in the age of longevity

40) "In the United States, a doctor named Walter Jackson Freeman heard of Moniz’s procedure and became his most enthusiastic acolyte. Over a period of almost forty years, Freeman traveled the country performing lobotomies on almost anyone brought before him. On one tour, he lobotomized 225 people in twelve days. Some of his patients were as young as four years old. He operated on people with phobias, on drunks picked up off the street, on people convicted of homosexual acts—on anyone, in short, with almost any kind of perceived mental or social aberration. Freeman’s method was so swift and brutal that it made other doctors recoil. He inserted a standard household ice pick into the brain through the eye socket, tapping it through the skull bone with a hammer, then wriggled it vigorously to sever neural connections. Here is his breezy description of the procedure in a letter to his son: ‘I have been…knocking them out with a shock and while they are under the ‘anesthetic’ thrusting an ice pick up between the eyeball and the eyelid through the roof of the orbit actually into the frontal lobe of the brain and making the lateral cut by swinging the thing from side to side. I have done two patients on both sides and another on one side without running into any complications, except a very black eye in one case. There may be trouble later on but it seemed fairly easy, although definitely a disagreeable thing to watch.’ Indeed. The procedure was so crude that an experienced neurologist from New York University fainted while watching a Freeman operation. But it was quick: patients generally could go home within an hour. It was this quickness and simplicity that dazzled many in the medical community. Freeman was extraordinarily casual in his approach. He operated without gloves or a surgical mask, usually in street clothes." -- The Body: A Guide for Occupants

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