So people who exercise, eat healthy and never touch drugs or excess of any kind and do all they can to stay fit only to die so soon into their lives?
But then you have people who drink, smoke and do drugs in massive amounts for ages but they last for a long time all things considered and sometimes way older then other average people
This isn’t the case for all of them but it happens enough to be noticed
So how and why does this happen?
Thanks for reading and have a nice day
In: Other
My mother is the laziest person ever. She would drive the three hundred yards from her apartment to the grocery store. She smoked for 50 years and only gave it up when it became too expensive. To this day, she drinks at least two martinis a day, one during the 5:00 news and one during Wheel of Fortune.
My mother is 91. She looks as if she could be 75.
Genetics.
Also keep in mind that every “super old person” you see today grew up in a time when it was far more common for people to drink and smoke heavily. In the US, we peaked in the 60s with around 45% of adults smoking. In some other countries like France, it was even higher (~60%).
Death is all about chance. You can go out right now and just hit your head somewhere and dies or dormant genetic disease just awakes and you’re dead.
Smoking and drink just rise the chance of dying, but it’s not a guarantee. Also having a healthy lifestyle don’t guarantee that you will live to the hundreds.
I’m not saying that anybody should live unhealthy you dies anyways. Remember that you have a whole life before death and if you live healthy you will live better, with less pain and with more energy to do what you want to do.
Imagine you’re in a lottery, and the prize is cancer.
There’s a big metal round cage with tickets in it, and the skeletal hand of death reaches in to pull out tickets. Most of the tickets are blank, but for just being alive, there’s at least one in there with your name.
You decide to start smoking and more tickets with you name go on. Drinking, a few more. More cancer causing habits and you keep adding more tickets with your name.
But it’s all probability. One person could do every vice and luck out, and another could do everything right to reduce their risk, but it pulls out the ticket that was just for being alive.
This doesn’t explain the complex intercellular reasons, but more the statistical reasons.
It’s all genes. Yes, you are more than likely to get certain cancers if you smoke and drink heavily. A lot do, I have seen it in my family. I also knew a nieghbour that had a heart attack in his 30s, perfectly healthy, a jogger, no fat, he is still alive. I had an uncle who worked for oc transpo and drank alcohol like it was water his whole life and lived into his late 80s. I worked with a guy that was a health fanatic, perfect shape and muscle mass, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, no drugs. died in his sleep mid 50s.
Death is a diceroll. You roll a dice with 1000 sides, and if you get a 1, you die that day.
Smoking gives you more dice to roll. Being unfit, doing drugs, obesity, gives you more dice to roll. Suddenly you’re rolling 10 dice a day and your odds of hitting that 1 go up and up.
But you can still get unlucky and roll a 1 on your first roll without all that. You can still get lucky and not roll that 1 over and over even with 100 dice.
Because they have the genes for it. Some people Just don’t get all the negative side effects for whatever reason, and it’s always the assholes
Chance. Things that are *risk factors* (ie increase your chances of something bad) are generally not 100% guarantees.
Imagine two people rolling a die with 10,000 sides. The healthy person dies if they roll a 1, the smoker and drinker dies if they roll from 1 to 100. Now roll every day for the rest of their lives.
Eventually the unhealthy person is way more likely to hit their bad numbers, but that doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed to, and the healthy person could still hit that 1 while the smoker never rolls under a 250 a single day in their life.
Now if you have a large group of each kind of person, like *the population*, then you *will* get the smokers rolling into their bad numbers 100 times more than the non smokers *on average*, so with a large enough group of people you *will* see that trend emerge.
But for any *individual* person, they might just never roll it in their lives.
Chainsmokers and heavy drinkers who get to the age of 90 are the exception, rather than the rule.
Not the norm for sure. My bio mom drank like alcoholic fish & smoked 3 pks a day. She starting smoking when she was 8 yrs old. She died of emphysema and lung cancer at age 61. I’m certain she had cirrhosis of the liver but that wasn’t what killed her. We were all shocked she lasted that long with her being the most surprised of all.
Latest Answers