With all the poisons out there, how are life expectancies rising?

They aren’t all that poisonous?

Because the chemicals are not quite as bad as the fearmongers believe.

It’s more of a math and statistics thing than people actually living longer. We’re not actually extending the outer limits of what humans live. It’s just that more of us are managing to live to the outer range.

When infant and child mortality goes down, the life expectancy shoots up. When the life expectancy is really low in a developing country, it doesn’t mean that people really die much younger. It means that many more babies die. Infant and child mortality kills your life expectancy numbers. If your infant mortality rate is 50% and your life expectancy age 50, that means that if you don’t die in early childhood, you have a decent chance of living to your late 90s. It the beginning of life, not the end that is the hard part.

In developing worlds, if you manage to survive early childhood, you can still potentially live as long as the oldest seniors in the developed world. Modern medicine doesn’t extend the final years as much as people think it does. Think about how many people are older than dirt and they never ever go to the doctor until they are 90 and about to keel over.

modern medicine?

I agree with @keobooks. It’s more like way back in the day people died by age 5 or lived to be 70, so the mean was 40–50 years old. So, it is also important to note what type of average is being cited, mean or median, rarely mode would be used.

Plus, some illnesses are treated now more than before which even extends the numbers for older adults, even increasing the life expectancy more, like heart diseases treatments, and other illness, but the biggest influence I think is mortality under the age of 5, which greatly affects the mean average and median.

@keobooks Infant and child mortality kills your life expectancy numbers. Kills? Funny. Pun intended?

Interesting discussion above. I would add that according to the film “Toxic Soup” there are around 100–200 chemicals in umbilical fluid that didn’t even exist before the age of industrial chemistry and pollution. Odd to think that that factoid (on balance) also fails to lend a significant hand to infant mortality.

Because, like everything else, the “bad” blown out of proportion to sell news.

Because while the chemicals would be poisons in high enough concentrations, they do protect our food from bugs and parasites and bacteria and whatnot, and prevent it from spoiling in storage, etc., which actually makes food marginally safer.

Median life expectancies aren’t rising that much, actually.

Also there were way more poisons out there before government regulation cracked down on it. Pittsburgh in the 1940’s, for example, had to turn on street lamps during the day time because smoke from factories blotted out the sun.

Paracelsus rightly said that the dose makes the poison. As @Qingu pointed out in the past in most Western countries the doses of most poisons people were subjected to were much higher. But even when poison levels stay the same life expectancy keeps rising mainly due to progress in medicine. Just take blood thinners and blood pressure medication as examples. They add many years to people’s lives.