© DUNG HOANG
Looking across generations at how health concerns have changed over the past century is an enlightening exercise. For your ancestors living in the roaring ’20s, fear of infectious diseases—including typhoid fever, cholera, and influenza—far outweighed concerns about heart disease or cancer. Autism, Alzheimer’s, attention deficit disorder, and Parkinson’s disease were virtually unheard of. Allergies, then called hay fever, were around, but not common. Ratchet ahead through the rock-and-roll and disco generations and on to the ’80s and ’90s, and the fear of cancer grew enormously, while a number of new diseases began to appear on the radar screen. Asthma, autism, lupus, arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, attention deficit disorder, celiac disease, multiple sclerosis, obesity, and diabetes, among others, became common concerns. Fast-forward another two decades to ...
