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Baby Boomers not Moving into Old Age Healthy
By Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News Service
May
31, 2009
Canada
Contrary to their healthy living image, baby boomers are “drifting” into old age with poor eating habits, too little exercise and decimated savings, said Robert Butler, CEO of the International Longevity Center (ILC).
“We do not have a healthy population moving into old age,” he said Sunday on the opening day of the 10th annual Age Boom Academy, a weeklong workshop on aging issues run by the ILC, a non-profit think-tank. “It’s a huge social change.”
What’s more, an acute shortage of geriatricians and caregivers means society is ill-prepared for a massive wave of old age, he says — but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
“We’ve got a real challenge with baby boomers unprepared (for age) and society unprepared for them,” Butler said. “I don’t think we can do in time the things that will most benefit them.”
However, Butler said he hopes boomers will still be “energetic” about bringing on changes that will benefit the generations to follow them.
By 2015 there will be more people in Canada over 65 than under 15, according to Statistics Canada’s most recent population projections. And the number of seniors is expected to double during the next 25 years.
In a report issued over the weekend by the ILC, The Future of Living:
Independently, boomers —_the generation born between the end of the Second World War and the early ’60s — are urged to plan ahead for old age and create “a meaningful social dialogue on aging.”
Boomers are encouraged to establish support systems “by keeping engaged, active and socially connected through pleasurable and meaningful activities like volunteering,” and try to live in communities that make this possible.
Boomers are also asked to “think strategically about access to health care” and use new technologies to prevent isolation and enhance safety.
In another session on Sunday, S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois, Chicago, said obesity in general is on the verge of causing an unprecedented decline in life expectancy in developed countries.
Entire generations who became overweight in childhood will come of age with a set of health risks never before seen, he says, and he predicts that within 10 to 15 years, that will reduce average life expectancy, following a century of rapid improvement. Current life expectancy in Canada is 82.5 years for women and 77.7 for men, according to Statistics Canada.
Only in the most recent chapter of human history have people even lived long enough to grapple with old age, Olshansky says, thanks to advances in medicine and public health that drastically reduced death rates from causes like infectious diseases and childbirth early in life.
“Aging as we know it today is a new phenomenon, really a 20th-century phenomenon,” he said.
We’ve effectively “redistributed death from the young to the old,” Olshansky said, but this extension in life expectancy combined with falling fertility rates means a massive shift in the global age structure on the immediate horizon.
Societies usually have lots of young members and few old members, he says, but by 2011, that’s poised to flip in the massive populations of developing countries like China and India, as well as in North America.
“Humanity will experience a permanent shift in our age structure,” Olshansky said. “We will no longer be a relatively young population, we will become an aged species.”
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