[big_ole_jpn]

Originally Posted by Danth [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I drive a car with a V-8 engine, wear a broad-brimmed hat, believe men are men and women are women and it's okay that they're not the same, and don't have any notion of how to work a smartphone (indeed, I refuse to carry a cellular phone at all). Guess I'm a dinosaur. I can live with that.

A lot of the reason you're seeing an increase in cancer deaths and such nowadays has to be because folks aren't dying of other stuff first quite so often. Historically it was fairly commonplace for men, especially, to keel over dead from heart attacks in their upper 40's or 50's. That doesn't happen nearly so often anymore. My old man had a major heart attack in 1988 that should've killed him when he was 61 (and would have in any other era)...instead he recovered and lived almost another 20 years and died of other issues unrelated to the heart instead. Same for my mom, she lived long enough due to modern health care that she died of things that wouldn't have had a chance to kill her in earlier eras. Heck, prior to postwar medicine she would've died from pregnancy complications and I wouldn't be here to post this. It's a common story. Odds are a fair number of you folks wouldn't, either, considering that some half of all people used to die in childhood, who consequently never had a chance to die of the things we die of nowadays.

There's truth in that it's all too easy to eat a lot of food and still wind up malnourished. We're better off than we used to be because most everyone can *afford* food now (food used to be expensive!) but folks still have to educate themselves to be sure they're getting the nutrition they need. "Junk" food is a fairly modern invention and the human subconscious hasn't really had a chance to get used to the notion, yet.

At least in my case the change in restaurant cooking oil had a very unintended effect: The vegetable-oil fried french fries are far inferior, taste disgusting, and caused me to stop eating out years ago. The restaurants also seem to dump loads more salt on stuff to try to compensate for the lack of flavor and it only succeeds in turning the food into a sort of salt lick. Lots more sugar in stuff now too. Yuck! In the early 90's I used to buy fries a couple times a week, at least....I haven't bought any for years and years now.

That being said, I don't drink bottled water. It always tastes like plastic and I'm fairly sure water isn't supposed to taste like plastic.

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If men aren't developing their muscles as well nowadays as they used to it's quite probably due more to changing demands than due to dietary factors. Most modern men simply don't *use* their muscles all that much unless due to deliberate exercise; manual labor just isn't a big deal for most folks. Doing homeowner work with picks and shovels and blue-collar factory work involving heavy lifting has largely been replaced by mechanized assistance and white-collar office work. To put it another way, I bet most men can't ride a horse as well as the typical guy could 100 years ago, either.

Those "manly" victorian-era men? Nope, they were routinely mocked for being foppish dandys by the older men of that time. I look at millennial guys and think all too many of 'em look like a bunch of sorry weaklings, but that's the new norm and they're a reflection of the times just as I'm a reflection of my era.

I see. Would you describe yourself as a Renaissance man?