Do you know that in ancient Rome the average person could expect to live only 23 years? About a hundred years ago in the United States, one’s life expectancy was 40 years.

Most people would like to live a long time; nobody wants to grow old. But growing old is a process that begins with birth itself and continues throughout life.

We all know what happens as a person grows older and older. A11 the functions and reactions of the body slow down. Some of a person’s strength is lost, and the senses become duller. There is usually also a loss in weight and height. Along with this may come a failing of eyesight, partial deafness, gray hair, and flabby and less elastic skin.

Not all people age at the same rate, but certain changes that come with age cannot be escaped. This is because changes take place in the tissues of the body and in all its organs. For example, the tissue cells of the kidney, liver, pancreas, and spleen begin to waste away. This is because the blood vessels become aged and don’t supply blood and nourishment as they used to. The thyroid and other glands deteriorate similarly.

The whole circulatory system of the body begins to change with age and doesn’t function as actively as it used to. We don’t even breathe in the same way because of these changes. The eyes, the ears, the bones and the joints, the blood, the skin, the hair, the nails and the teeth all begin to degenerate, or waste away.

In our digestive tracts, there is a cutting down of gastric juices. The stomach and intestines lose some of their muscle tone, and the blood supply is disturbed. This is why older people often have to change their diets.

These changes are biological and cannot be prevented, simply because older tissues and organs cannot do the job they once used to. But they don’t happen uniformly. A man of sixty may have certain organs and tissues in his body that are like those of a man of eighty, while other parts of him may be in as good condition as those of men of forty, thirty, or even twenty.