Expected Life

Interesting story on the BBC site today about life expectancy in the UK, basically it claims that in recent years the rate of increase for the average figures (which have been increasing since 1982) has slowed to the point that now it has stopped. In some parts of the UK the averages have even fallen slightly. For women the average now stands at 83 years and for men a little less at 79 years, people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have seen falls of around 0.1 years. It's interesting to speculate what the cause of this might be? I would put my money on the prime factor being the general increase in obesity and apparent lack of regular exercise going on. When you gaze around in public places these days it's quite alarming how many (very) overweight people there are (>50%?), food and drink content (adverts and programmes) saturate our media and people seem to spend a much larger proportion of their free-time focused on calorific consumption than I remember we used to. 

What data there is in the public domain does seem to suggest that as a population we're less healthy than we used to be 10 years ago, although I do get the sense that the current generation of teenagers do seem to be more aware of the issue than middle-aged people. Unfortunately though, these kinds of problems take years to filter through, I wouldn't be completely surprised if we see further falls in life expectancy before people start to realise that just because we've got smart phones and 4K TV our bodies still require sensible management. One of the outcomes of Brexit is that experts are predicting that food prices may well increase by up to 8-10% due to increased tariffs, if this happens (likely) then perhaps it will provide the catalyst required for people to start to be a little more sensible and measured about what they eat? (I think I may have found the only positive outcome of Brexit!)