I mean if u don’t die from a heart attack or something. If you die from aging how do you die? Do you just stop breathing?
In: Biology
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The “natural” way to die is alone, in a ditch, too weak to seek food or water, as your internal organs shut down for various reasons.
Or being torn to shreds by predators who will either try to kill you as quickly as possible or just start eating you ass first as soon as you stop struggling.
In my own bed, at the age of 80, with a belly full of wine and a girl’s mouth around my cock.
>what is the natural way to die?
Eaten by a predator, starving to death, food poisoning, trampled by a prey, infection after being harmed etc.etc.
We have extended our lifespans much longer than what is normally expected of an animal.
This means that our body progressively becomes less fit to sustain itself, but we are able to sustain it via societial, scientific and technological means.
The older we get, the more susceptible we are to localized failures in our system and the less effective we are at repairing damage.
Sooner or later something in our body fails irreversibly causing death (generally later the more care we used to it throughout our lifespan)
Most probably in a “natural” environment we would be loosing fitness to survival much earlier than when most other effects would present themselves, and cancer or heart attacks wouldn’t be much of a concern.
This comes up a lot, and it’s often very wrong answers that get upvoted, or at least very very incomplete.
The Wikipedia page for [Manner of Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manner_of_death) states:
>A death by natural causes results from an illness and its complications or an internal malfunction of the body not directly caused by external forces, other than infectious disease. For example, a person dying from complications from pneumonia, diarrheal disease or HIV/AIDS (infections), cancer, stroke or heart disease (internal body malfunctions), or sudden organ failure would most likely be listed as having died from natural causes. “Death by natural causes” is sometimes used as a euphemism for “dying of old age”, which is considered problematic as a cause of death (as opposed to a specific age-related disease); there are also many non-age-related causes of “natural” death, for legal manner-of-death purposes. (See Cause of death § Aging.)
Some people get confused because there is a medical context, a legal context, and casual speech, ala *euphemism for “dying of old age”*…but even that may be too crude a grouping.
Context is key, even similar context may have different sub-context.
>There is particular ambiguity around the classification of cardiac deaths triggered by a traumatic incident, such as in stress cardiomyopathy. Liability for a death classified as by natural causes may still be found if a proximate cause is established,[2][3] as in the 1969 California case People v. Stamp.[4]
A court may consider “natural” to mean “not homicide or negligence”, or, it may find that “natural causes” is not sufficient enough, maybe they were old but *also* given the wrong medication, so the court would have to determine the exact cause to see if it was negligence or even murder.
A medical determination may mean specifically old age, the pathology being somewhat irrelevant because every organ was about to fail….At the same time, a medical determination may need to know specifically, even in the case of old age, to trace pathology for research purposes.
What if it was cancer from extreme radiation or toxin? That’s not necessarily “natural” in terms of finding liability, and not useful medically either…
Every different discussion containing “natural death” or “natural causes” would have to be taken in it’s own individual context, the nature of the question asked, and the desires of the person giving the answer.
Someone talking about a loved one might say “natural causes” regardless of the cause because they simply don’t want to talk about it. A Dr. or Lawyer, similarly may find the cause of death trivial, or extremely important. Research would probably be the least likely to use “natural causes” specifically because the whole point is to study the miniscule cause/effects.
Other than that, there is no unifying rule that explains all possibilities.
I have signed literally hundreds if not thousands of death certificates. Your cause of death options are natural, accident, suicide, homicide, undetermined, and pending. The vast majority are natural causes. People die from vital organ failure. For example breast cancer doesn’t hurt you until it gets into a vital organ like the liver or lung and causes it to fail. In that case I would sign the death certificate natural causes, #1 cause liver failure secondary to #2 cause breast cancer.
As others have mentioned, it organ failure that is gradually developed through cellular damage.
It’s usually heart disease. But it could be various organs with cancer or vascular damage in the brain.
Kidneys failure is a really common precursor too.
As others have said, basically your always dying, at i think 25 your body begins to degrade instead of growing. Eventually all the degradation catches up in lots of ways, a cancer cell slips through that your body missed, a organ fails (or multiple), essentially your body just cant keep up with keeping itself alive properly anymore and it piles up till, shutdown.
You don’t die from aging.
Something is always the root cause. Heart failure is one of the most common.
Your body is a complicated system of a lot of moving parts. As you get older, all of those parts get wear and tear. They keep up the best they can, but eventually something falls behind. Maybe your digestive system stops you from eating, maybe your kidneys or liver fall behind on processing waste, maybe your heart slows down and cant’ keep up with pumping blood. Then other systems start to fail because of that one, and then eventually the whole system shuts down because something fully breaks.
The reason they say “died of old age” or “natural causes” even though technically it was a heart attack or something, is that it was pretty expected at that point that *something* was going to fail. It’s like a bridge slowly falling apart. Piece by piece it crumbles until it collapses. But you don’t say “well, that last little stone was what caused the bridge to collapse,” because it was that one, plus the 5,000 others that had already fallen that finally contributed to the collapse. If you managed to keep that little stone in place, a different one would fall at that point, or two others, basically the bridge was teetering towards collapse, so the specific brick that fell at the last moment isn’t really important.
Your body is one big clump of cells. Its constantly replicating these cells but every time it does it there’s minor changes. Imagine a xerox machine. You start with the original copy and make a copy and take that copy and make a copy and then that copy and make a copy etc etc. Everytime you make a copy the quality of the image gets worse and worse. This is aging.
So, accumulatively, over the years you entire body just breaks down and gets weaker. Your genetics and lifestyle can make certain parts break down faster or worse.
Our bones and joints get fragile and weak. Our hearing and eyesight can start to go. Your organs can get poor at doing their job. Your brain can even just start breaking down. All of these things can trigger various series of events that can kill you.
Nobody just stops breathing from old age. They just get really fragile and a simple illness or injury can steamroll series of events that their body is just too weak to bounce back from and they die from that.
As a nurse I see a lot of UTIs, dementia, pneumonia and hip fractures in the super elderly.
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