Earlier quoted context omitted.
Polio etc survivors may have been less obese but they didn’t spend less time battling disease. Often someone would be dealing with the consequences of childhood illnesses or injuries for decades.
Indeed, but I am talking about the sum of all disease. Polio is a good example of the opposite, because polio today is effectively zero. Most other types of disease trend the other way with much more significant margins. Polio lead to some level of paralysis in somewhere between 0.5-0.2% percent of people, many of whom died and needed no further healthcare. Today, a far larger percent of Americans have lost the abili…
Tuberculosis, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Cholera, Polio, Smallpox, Tetanus, Varicella(Chickenpox> shingles), etc didn’t individually leave large segments of the population with serious lifelong issues, but collectively they added up. Add in a little cut or malnutrition and even diseases we don’t normally consider serious would more frequently have huge long term health impacts.
Very few young people lose the ability to walk from obesity, that’s generally something that impacts older people who were able bodied up to that point. Infectious diseases however generally hit the young harder more than people with fully developed immune systems.