Name: 【TEDx】The epidemic of chronic disease and understanding epigenetics | Kent Thornburg | TEDxPortland
Uploaded: 2017-03-17T05:43:46.000Z
Duration: 16 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Future simple

I'm wearing a sport coat so that you will trust me.

To-infinitive

If I had wanted you to think I was creative, I would have worn jeans.

But I have a story to tell you about chronic disease,

and you're the first generation that can ever hear this story

I want you to join with me in a "hard think."

I'm going to tell you some nice stuff to make you feel good at the beginning,

but we have a lot of serious issues to face

I hope you'll enjoy it so you will feel like we're all part of the same team

When I talk to you, I want you to answer this question all the way through:

I want you to ask, when will we decide to eliminate chronic disease?

The reason we can ask that question now is because we know what causes it,

So I hope that by the time I've finished my talk,

you will be convinced that you can make a big difference to do something about it.

Here's the good feelings: if you look at the last century,

you'll notice that in 1900, we had a life expectancy of 50.

actually in 2010, when we calculated it again,

Our life expectancy increased by 30 years over one century of time.

and that's chronic diseases like heart disease, stroke, and cancer,

those diseases have been killing fewer people every year.

So we should start feeling good that we're going to be healthier.

And if you look at these two facts, what you're going to think is,

"I can sit back and relax because isn't it nice

we as a human race, and we as Americans, are getting healthier?"

Now if you think that, you would be dead wrong.

And the reason is that our health has been declining over the last 25 years.

We have some evidence for that and some of it you've read in the paper.

For example, more people are becoming obese,

more people have uncontrolled blood pressure,

and all of these three things are the foundation for heart disease.

Now the interesting part of it is, we don't see it in our statistics yet

because it is predominantly affecting younger people

and they haven't died yet to show us that there has been a change.

So what you have to realize is that we are in a new predicament

of being able to predict what's going to happen in our future.

And here's one other thing I need to say that you might not have thought of before:

That is that our children are the first generation

that represents three generations of eating processed food.

And because of that, we now have a really big job on our hands

to understand what that has done to the human race

In this slide, you can see the first line is the one I already showed you,

that's perfectly linear over that period of time.

we should be able to gain another 30 years in the next century, right?

medical scientists now tell us that because of diabetes and because of obesity

that they are going to be the first generation

ever in the United States to live shorter lives than their parents.

So what that means is that we are now  on the trajectory that's going down.

We know it because we who study disease can predict what's going to happen

Okay, so what we need to do is find a way

to take that downward arrow, and put it on the up.

And if we can do that, we should be able to face a century of increased health,

Now I have to talk about my friend, David Barker.

who came to Portland to work with us over a decade ago.

And 25 years ago, he started the whole movement

for us to understand how chronic disease works.

and if you forget everything else I say today,

take this curve home in your mind because it tells the whole story.

What he showed was that if you're born at the low end of the birth-weight scale -

this has been done in seven countries now -

if you're at the five-pound end of the birth-weight scale on the average,

you have a three to five times higher risk of dying of heart disease

than if you were born at the eight to nine-pound range.

And furthermore, if you are on the upscale,

your risk goes up like the babies that were born small.

So, all of the sudden, we have a really new profound thing to say

about chronic disease that we never knew before.

And what that is, is that how you grow before you're born matters.

And it's not just how [you grow] before you're born,

it's also in the first two years of your life.

So the nutrition, and the conditions you lived in,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TEDx】The epidemic of chronic disease and understanding epigenetics | Kent Thornburg | TEDxPortland

vulnerable

chronic

process

epidemic