Welcome back to the show. Today's topic is something that always comes up, every single time I do a public presentation like election, and typically some of them will raise their hand and they will say, Sean, I don't get it. I don't understand how the food can be so bad when we are living so much longer. Then they will go into the stats, they will say, in 1900, we were living to be about 45 and now we live to be about 76, 77. How does that work if the food is so bad? And they will go on to say, oh I think the food is better, we take the fat out, we take the cholesterol out. We live longer and the only reason that we get heart disease and cancer these days is because we live long enough to get them.
Whereas 1900 and before, we died so early that we never got those types of conditions. So I said, okay, I mean you have a point. It really does make sense if you haven't looked into it. So we have to consider, what are we actually talking about? We are talking about average life span and so what average life span means is that you take all of the recorded life burst and then you take all of the desks and you see how old people were when they passed away, you divide it by the number of people and that's what gives you this average life span deal. But here is how well I can think about it. It's about we are living longer these days or is it that less people, a lot less people are dieing prematurely, because in the 1900s, in the 1800s, far back people lived old. People lived to the 70, 80, 90-years-old. But a disproportionate amount of people lived to be 20 or even younger because they died prematurely and so they really just screwed up the average.
For example in the – where is that book? Check this out. In the 18th century, people lived to be between 30 and 40 years of age. However, check out this list, this list comes from a book called “The Detox Book” by Bruce Fife, and brushing up on my detox living. But look at these notable 18th century figures. Benjamin Franklin, he was 84-years-old when he died. George Washington was 67, Thomas Jefferson was 83, John Adams was 91, George Washington became President at the age of 57-years-old. Thomas Jefferson became President at the age of 58, when the average life span was between 30 and 40 and so they literally elected really, really, really old men as President. So now we are worried about John McCain. We say John McCain is old, but looking at Washington and Jefferson, that's like John McCain being like a 120-years-old right now.
Alright, so we forget about these things, we forget about these old cats from back in the day that we absolutely revere and celebrate and how old they were. So what statisticians and researchers have done is they have debunked this myth by considering why were people dieing and they say, okay, people are going to say that the diets is the reason why we are living this long. Well, that's so limiting, all of the deaths, all of the premature deaths that didn't have anything to do with diet.
Okay, for example, infant mortality in 1900 was 165 out 1,000 births. Today, it is – I am looking at all those sheet here, 6 out of every 1,000. Mothers' mortality, the mothers' mortality is women who died during child birth or soon thereafter child birth, they were one out of every 100 in 1900 and 13 out of every 100,000 now. So things have gotten better, things have improved. Doctors have learned that they are supposed to keep the equipments sterile, doctors have learned that they supposed to wash their hands before they do some type of treatment like giving birth to a baby. So we have learned those things, but that doesn't have anything to do with diet. So let's throw it out.
Let's also throw out, sanitation. Alright, sanitation has improved tremendously over the last 100 years. We have learned a lot. We no longer have the trash dumped in the middle of town. We no longer live around all of this garbage, all of this sewage, all of this bacteria that can give us an infection and you got to remember back then, they didn't had antibiotics, okay, to fight those infections. So let'
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