Who gets to be Healthy? - Michael Marmot

[@matthewleitch1]

Life expectancy for people born in recent years is a prediction. Without knowing how the actuaries did it I find it hard to know how to react to changes in life expectancy.

[@matthewleitch1]

What to do when a driver of ill health is the behaviour of the unhealthy person (e.g. smoker, heavy junk food eater) and they strongly resist attempts to persuade them to live more healthily, even though they can afford to (e.g. not smoking is cheaper)? Is it unfair to try yet fail to change such a person? What if parents set a bad example to their children by living in unhealthy ways (e.g. smoking, boozing)? How do we intervene on that? How far can we go in forcing the parents to behave differently for the sake of their children? Is it better to separate the children from their parents? I was interested to know how the speaker tackles these issues. He has a little go at these issues at around 43 minutes but not really satisfactorily. He only tackles poor diet, and does it by claiming that to afford a particular form of healthy diet requires too much money for the lowest decile by income. But, stats on obesity and childhood obesity show that these are highest in this same decile. This means that many can afford more food than they need. It's not just rich families who eat junk food who are behaving badly. There are some at every income decile.