Longevity and Fertility

I came across an interesting article today on the relationship between human longevity and fertility, obesity, and gender. The article noted a a few interesting distinctions in longevity trends which I haven’t really covered very much on this site.

For one the author notes that species tend to have increased longevity when they are less fertile:

Similar factors also affect humans, for example women in countries hit by famine... When there’s a famine, women often stop ovulating and lose reproductive condition. For women whose bodies find a way to remain fertile, they produce more babies but tend to have shorter lives than others.

The author also notes that women tend to be more obese when they are poor in wealthy nations and rich in poor nations:

We may think that the high obesity rates are a disease of wealthy nations – but you’ll find that the people who are most at risk for obesity are the poor women in wealthy countries and the wealthier women in poor countries,' Professor Brooks says. 'Although one of the reasons is that these women can afford only enough high energy food to get obese, but not enough food with high protein, we also found that far more women are obese than men.

This seems to indicate that women who are either poor in wealthy nations or rich in poor nations are at a disadvantage when it comes to their expected levels of longevity due to their likelihood of becoming obese.

Obesity also affects fertility and women who are obese usually are less fertile and thus this does help to offset the loss of life expectancy but obviously not entirely and not in every case.

If anything, all of this is just interesting food for thought. For more on increasing longevity check out this handy list of longevity tips I prepped a while back and if you want to check out the complete article it can be found at Red Orbit.

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