Why in the past did people look older than their age?
These are probably the reasons
If you've wondered why your parents look older in photos taken when they were in their 20s - you're not alone.
These are the reasons why people used to look older than their age - and it's not just because of the clothes they wore
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08/08/2022
Monday, 08 August 2022, 00:11
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The opening of the series "Free at the bar" from 1982 (NBC)
Have you ever looked through old family photo albums or watched an old TV show and wondered why these young people look so old?
Just make a comparison between your wedding photos and your parents' wedding photos or between the cast of "Modern Family" or "The Big Bang" and "Free at the Bar" from the early 80's - and you will argue for the differences.
Same ages but look in completely different age groups.
Recently, a number of astonishing comparisons between how men and women between the ages of 20 and 40 looked in the not-so-distant past - and how people of their age look today.
Hence the question - why?
So it's true, in the past people would dress differently and since the fashion of the past reminds us of our grandparents, it's easy for us to understand why the young people in the pictures look so old.
However, this is certainly not the only reason for the difference.
The age of the "Free at the Bar" cast members in the first season (Photo: NBC)
In a video published by Vsauce, Michael Stevens explains that there have been changes in aging rates over time due to various factors such as standard of living, medical treatments and lifestyle choices.
Also, in the better-off parts of the world - and even in areas where these improvements have been made - there are disparities between different groups based on income and status.
It's not surprising that a better standard of living affects our aging (a worker in an air-conditioned office who does exercise will age better than a Victorian chimney sweep who smokes 20 cigarettes a day), but it is surprising that the change is so clearly felt over just a few decades.
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A study published in 2018 examined the changes in biological aging (using markers such as blood pressure and lung function) that changed in relation to chronological age, between the years 1988 and 2010.
They found that even in this short time frame, there were significant differences in aging, with recent generations being biologically "younger" than those that came before them.
"Over the past 20 years, the biological age of the US population appears to have declined for males and females across the age range," the team wrote in the study, "however, the degree of change was not the same for men and women or by age.
Our results showed that young males experienced greater improvements than young females.
This finding may explain why the premature mortality of adults decreased more for males than females, which contributes to reducing the mortality gap between the sexes."
34 years old in 1983 and 34 years old in 2021
They are the same age!
The study emphasizes lifestyle factors such as smoking, which partly explains why the gap between men's and women's biological ages has closed, as men began to smoke less and women caught up.
In addition, the use of drugs led to health improvements.
"However, a significant part of the declines over time were not taken into account," they write, "additional explanations for the improvement in the health of the population that we were not able to test are better conditions at the beginning of their lives and before their birth - and a reduction in infectious diseases."
Here's the full explanation from Michael from Vsauce:
From left to right - 22 years old, 46 years old, 23 years old, 47 years old
And an Israeli example: 64-year-old Begin versus 64-year-old Ram Ben Barak
The health changes and the upgraded lifestyle (along with the improvement in dental health and the widespread use of sunscreen and anti-aging products) are all knocking a few years off our age, or as Michael from Vsauce pointed out, the 60-year-olds will look 56 and the 40-year-olds will look 37.5.
In the photos the gap looks bigger and rightly so - because there is also the element of old fashion as we talked about earlier.
We automatically associate old fashions with old age, as well as the hairstyles, accessories and even the more mature behavior of those characters on the screen.
If we combine all these elements we will reach the same gap of a decade that we see in the pictures.
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adolescence
old age
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