What is a Healthy Body? A Biodemographer’s View

A formal definition of disease defines by its absence, a formal definition of health. This may have been a productive concept in the early twentieth century when many of the diseases we faced were acute and fatal, but in today’s world it’s evident that how we define disease and disability—and by extension, a healthy body—should be determined not just by the presence of a disease, but also by how any given disease influences physical and psychological functioning. Complicating the definition of a healthy body is a set of events we willingly brought on ourselves—life extension caused by advances in public health and medicine, and population aging caused by lower fertility and declining old-age mortality. Technology has managed to transform many conditions that in previous generations would have been either completely debilitating or fatal, into little more than nuisances that are often no longer perceived. A biodemographic perspective of the definition of a healthy body is one based on a more complete understanding of the various ways in which humans adapt to inevitable changes in our bodies that occur with the passage of time.