How the Mid-Victorians Worked, Ate and Died (2009)

Glad to see it dead. MLMs are cancer.

I attended one of MonaVie's "internal"[0] meetings, invited there by an acquaintance of mine who was over-eager to get me to join in under him. I can tell you, this thing was literally a cult. The meeting consisted of people one-upping each other in describing how happy and rich they will be, coupled with top regional staff promising rewards for best performers - including, I kid you not, an orbital flight as a space tourist. The entire meeting was a happy death spiral[1] - a chain reaction of good feelings.

Seriously, I am so glad to see it down.

--

[0] - i.e. by distributors, for distributors, not meant for the product end-users.

[1] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/lm/affective_death_spirals/

This article seems to me to be a sales pitch, which makes me think that Dr. Rowbotham wrote the historical context for the article and Dr. Clayton built up the scientific portion. I'd call shenanigans, except the article was originally published in three parts by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (which is refereed), so I'm just calling shenani.

Since I am (or was) an historian I'm going to look at Dr. Rowbotham to see if I can make sense of her motivations for writing this paper.* That might help us understand why an historian would even consent to publish an article like this. At first glance, things don't look good. She's working in the school of business at Plymouth, which is weird, but perhaps that figures in to her interests in crime? She co-founded the SOLON institute, which has been the vehicle for publishing some of her work. Her work has been published by several journals and publishers, but generally they're not that great. The SOLON institute is also led by what most academics in English would consider "tier 3" universities, at best.

She just looks like a fringe academic.

But then we dive deeper into her resume. She was a Reader at Nottingham Trent Uni. Now, Nottingham is nothing to write home about, but being a Reader is-- in the US it's the equivalent of being an Associate Professor. Now she's a Visiting Research Fellow, which is usually a stipended position and allows the researcher to work solely on ... research. That means that her project, whatever it is, at the very least was interesting and viable to the University of Plymouth. So that's worth knowing, because even at low level universities research fellowships are desirable.

I think that this line from her bio may be key: "My research focus consequently shifted to 'bad' behaviour, and I began to develop my interdisciplinary credentials as a lawyer and criminologist as well as a historian of crime." After publishing her PhD thesis in 1989 she doesn't appear to have produced much research. Then in 2010 everything picks up. When seeing vitae gaps like this on the resume of a female professor the assumption of most (male) academics is that she was raising children, and that's probably true, but she also made a pivot in her career to law and criminology, which further interrupted her career.

She is likely a very rare creature in British academia: a generalist. That's the sort of thing that's horrible for a career in the UK, but may very well make her an excellent teacher and a great resource if you're into crime and law in Victorian England. I can't say of course. One thing I do know is that it's good (for the historical profession) to have historians reaching across fields and asking these sorts of questions. So, Dr. Clayton notwithstanding, this may very well be a worthwhile endeavor. I think we'd all like some corroboration, though, because the article itself is pretty shaky. I wonder if Dr. Rowbotham's training gave her an understanding of statistics.

* In theory someone could just ask, but then that wouldn't require the kind of qualitative analysis that historians do so well!

So how did this get published by the NIH?

And is there a way to tell if it has been peer reviewed?

Agree with that argument, but that still would not explain 90% difference in degenerative diseases occurence, unless you make the extraordinary claim that only 1 person of 10 nowadays would have survived in the Victorian Era.

It could mean that we should shift more resources into bringing people up to age 5 and let them coast from there ;-)

It's a comparison between people aged past 5 in both populations. It's not that unfair.

If you want to talk about unfair comparisons, you should look to all the people aged past 5 who wouldn't be alive without modern medicine (e.g. most terminal patients, some severe burn patients, some people with congenital defects, etc) and who inevitably lower the average health measures of our current populations. There's some seriously strong self-selection bias at work here: as medicine advances, the difference in health indicators between earlier and later adult populations would always be increasingly favorable to the latter.

>life expectancy at age 5

This is the catch. The kid with asthma or diabetes didn't make it to age 5 back then, but today he does. Replace asthma or diabetes with other conditions. If your higher infant mortality is weeding out everyone who has any chronic disease which may effect longevity then this is what you get. The downside is that parents back then were burying a lot of babies.

Yeah, that comparison is so jarringly wrong it makes me question the rest of their research.

Modern Britons' life expectancies at 65 which actually are "comparable" with Victorian life expectancies at 65 are available in well publicised, frequently-updated and granular time series from ONS[1]. But since they suggest life expectancy is about twice as long for todays' 65 year olds as Victorian ones the authors appear to have deliberately distorted the truth by choosing a less relevant basis for comparison instead.

Needless to say, if they're prepared to commit statistical frauds as blatant as this, the rest of their claims should be regarded as suspicious especially the more outrageous longevity claims. It wasn't a surprise to find that one of the authors runs a nutrition supplement company and has been featured on Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog before

Which is a shame, because there probably are valid, non-obvious points about aspects of Victorian diets and lifestyles that were healthier than ours, buried under wilfully misleading claims about degenerative diseases being a purely modern phenomenon.

[1]https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Indeed, there are many kings who made it to their 70s and 80s. Even Charlemagne died at 71.

Also in Diogenes Laerteos' book most philosophers from 7th century BC to 3rd AD live about 70-80 years (the book itself written about 3rd AD).

My favorite misconception along those lines is often worded as "If you made it to 30 back then, you were considered elderly"

I don't know why, but this information has come up a lot in conversation the past week for me. My family, which mostly live unhealthy sedentary lives, discussed dying at 60. I was trying to make the point to them, if we gathered the statistic for people who live over 40, you would find that the average lifespan is much close to 80-90. The reason being is infant mortality and youthfulness. When you are young, you take many more risks (ie. driving fast in your car, drinking and drugging, etc.). There is a certain threshold age where you are just competing with Cancer and getting old, but the rate of death is much lower.

Now I should just do some real research to back up that for them with statistics.

Death during school age is a novelty now. It makes news. The rare case of childhood cancer. Every large suburban high school has traffic fatallity by inexperienced, partying students. But usually just one. If you read biographies from US revolutionary times (1700s), almost every nuclear family knew death. Families were often blended with widows and widowers rapidily remarrying due to the burden of raising a family. Sometimes this lead to the story of the cold parent or step-parent who did not invest as much emotional capital in a child who might not last.

The article needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Our infant mortality has gone down, leading to many more "weaker" individuals making it past five (of course a positive thing for most). These individuals are likely to have a shorter lifetime expectancy (sometimes far too short), dragging down the average.

These individuals are sorted out entirely in the historic data, as they would not have made it till 5 years of age back then, which is the age they use for the comparison.

In other words, it does not produce any evidence that a healthy individual from back then is any healthier than a healthy individual now. It merely shows that our weak individuals live longer than back then, turning an infant death into a maybe decent life.

wasn't sugar fairly expensive at some time?

I suspect a diet of no cars would be very unpallatable these days.

Call it the steampunk diet, and you'd probably have a hit.

/insert a ton of random gears here...

And drop the consumption of sugars significantly

If you ignore the garbage information on the Internet, the advice is pretty consistent going back decades. Exercise as much as possible. Eat an appropriate amount of food. In other words, if you are overweight, eat less. Eat whole foods, preferably cooked by yourself or another human with your interests in mind.

It's not rocket science. But it is hard, since it goes against many of our instincts and marketing and societal pressures.

Doubling calorie needs is hard if you have a sedentary job in the modern world.

Walk / Cycle to work every day at a fast pace (1 hour total). Play some kind of sport daily at lunchtime / after work (1 hour). You’ve just used an extra 1000 calories or so. Congratulations: you’re almost half way to your goal of doubling your daily calorie output.

Plus you still need to spend time doing all the other stuff to keep your life going outside work.

It can be done, but modern life guides people to a constant sedentary lifestyle. Drive to work, sit at home in the evenings watching TV etc etc.

3. Reduce the number of people on earth to 19th century levels.

> So we need to do two things

TBH we only need to do one thing which is to ignore the article. As stated in other comments, the authors' life expectancy premise is horribly flawed to such an extent that it is hard to make the case that it isn't deliberate.

If you use the correct data, the only sensible conclusion you can make is that, for life expectancy at all ages, it's a hell of a lot better living now (in the UK at least) compared to living in the late 19C (in the UK).

Whether or not there were dietary benefits then versus now, I have no idea. Maybe there were but they are heavily swamped by medical and other considerations. What I do know is that this article adds nothing to the body of knowledge that would determine that.

The only unsubstantial dismissal I see in this thread is yours.

Can you tell me what you mean by "negative and dismissive"?

If negative includes perfectly valid criticism, then who cares? Dismissive? Which comments?

Rather than generalising over this thread-tree, why not respond to some? It seems a bit early for you to be invoking a stereotype.

Yes, I do find it interesting what gets downvoted and why. There is a great deal groupthink and foregone conclusions and not enough critical thinking. We are all subject to our own biases, but if those biases close up our minds to new ideas, then you aren't being scientific or seeking truth.

Being scientific means that when conclusions take you to places you are not comfortable with, you keep going anyways.

To avoid doing so is dangerous, and I see so much of that avoidance today, unfortunately for all of us. Reject that "religion" and free yourself from guilt.

Whether the past was better or worse is irrelevant. I only seek to understand the findings and have them inform our current times. I do find it hard to believe that life in the Victorian Era was longer/more enjoyable than today simply because modern medicine has evolved so much and because we know so much more about what harms people.

> I'd imagine that most of the cause is diet based

From the introduction:

Our recent research indicates that the mid-Victorians’ good health was entirely due to their superior diet.

Which is exactly what the article says. You should read it, it's pretty good.

It's right there in the first paragraph:

> high intake of fruits, whole grains, oily fish and vegetables

Men lived three years longer back then, according to TFA.

"Is that only because people didn't live long enough?"

According to the article, their life expectancy after the age of 5 was comparable to ours.

"excess eating"

According to the article, their calorific intake was approximately twice ours because they expended so much more calories working & keeping warm. 3000 calories for a "sedentary" man, over 5000 for a labourer.

In The Case Against Sugar, Gary Taubes makes the case that basically all of what kills people in old age now (diabetes, heart disease, and cancer) are the result of the way extremely large amounts of sugar are metabolized by our bodies. Sugar consumption per capita is way, way higher now than it was then.