• Question: Are micro-lives real? Eg. If we eat loads of unhealthy stuff with it knock 30 minutes of your life away?

    Asked by wizzyg12 to Sam, Rob, Matt, Claire on 24 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      It’s hard to be that exact about how much our life will shrink from doing unhealthy things. For example, heart attacks can be very sudden and can happen when you’re 50 or when you’re 70, plus you can always have accidents, or just have good luck with genes that are less likely to give you heart attacks or other diseases. What people normally mean is that people who live unhealthy lives *on average* live less long, so if you take a thousand people who live healthily and a thousand people who don’t, the thousand unhealthy people will have shorter lives. It’s very difficult to be exact about what effect being unhealthy has on your body – but it’s clear that an obese person will live less long and have more health problems than someone with a healthier weight.

    • Photo: Claire Lee

      Claire Lee answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Some people eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every day and live to be 100. Others die from a cholesterol -related heart attack at 40. Everybody’s different, and those numbers are based on averages.

      There is a lot to be said about this though. The “healthier” foods tend to be rich in things called antioxidants which help your body get rid of free radicals (which are one of the things people think cause cancers). But it seems we also need some free radicals, to get rid of other things that could cause trouble in our bodies.

      Mainly, unhealthy food has lots of “junk” calories. It’s like having a lot of bricks with which to build a house, but the bricks are really bad quality. You’d much rather build your house with good quality bricks. That’s sort of what food is to your body. Your body breaks down the food into it’s “bricks” and uses those to repair itself. The better the quality of the food you put in, the better your body will be.

      Your body replaces itself fully about once every 7 years!

      But of course a lot of unhealthy stuff is really yummy too. So… balance, as with most things in life, is what is important 🙂

    • Photo: Robert Woolfson

      Robert Woolfson answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      Short answer – It’s not that precise.

      Micro-lives is an idea used to try and create a measure of how bad some things are. So two cigarettes is one microlife, as is having a burger. It’s an idea that has created a lot of discussion as most people disagree over the relative badness of things.

      The anti-smoking lobby says cigarettes are far more dangerous, while militant vegans say burgers are far worse. Basically, everyone knows certain things are bad but no-one can agree how bad or whats worse. The 30 minutes is a useful figure, but how accurate it is I don’t know.

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