Living longer but spending more of our lives in ill health. That is the rather shocking picture presented by the figures for ‘healthy life expectancy’ published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) yesterday. They show that while life expectancy continues to rise modestly, the proportion of our lives lived in ‘good’ health is falling sharply. Between 2022 and 2024 men enjoyed 60.7 years of good health and women 60.9 years. This was, respectively, 1.8 years and 2.5 years down on the previous period for which data was collected, 2019 to 2020. We now appear to spend less of our lives in good health than we did at any time since the data began to be collected in this form between 2011 and 2013.

There will be no shortage of people proffering explanations for apparent declining health: ‘austerity’, no doubt; obesity, lack of exercise, long Covid, the stress of having to work a full five days a week, ultra-processed food (the current bogeyman, which gets blamed for just about........

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