Originally Posted by
terrymorse
Many people have been living long enough to die of heart disease for a long time. In 1900, heart disease mortality was 137.4 per 100,000. In 2010, it was 192.9 per 100,000.
An increase, certainly, but not an increase from zero. What changes drove the sharp increase in heart disease? Living longer? A little. The biggies were (are): smoking, sedentary lifestyles, and crappy diet.
Personal data point: my grandfather died of a heart attack in 1926, at the age of 45.
"What changes drove the sharp increase in heart disease? Living longer? A little."
In 1900, the global life expectancy was around 32 years. In 2010, the global life expectancy was just short of 71 years.
I'm no public health expert, but an ex-girlfriend with one PhD in public health and another in epidemiology was. She's the one who pointed out to me, when I raised many of the points that you did above, that mutations accumulate linearly over time in organisms regardless of the usual risk factors that get blamed for increased rates of diseases.
Thus, she said, it's often difficult to winnow out which diseases are caused by environmental factors and which by mutations that would have occurred anyway.
So, I'm not saying that the factors you listed are not important. Only that, living as we are between 2 and 3 times longer than humans did until very recently, mutations accumulate, and that you rarely see that fact mentioned, let alone explored in depth, when discussions like this one arise.