Aging is the act and result of aging : making or becoming old or old. Depending on the context, the term can refer to certain specific phenomena.
When a living being ages, it experiences various physiological and morphological alterations produced by the passage of time . In a general sense, aging implies a loss of capabilities : the organism, due to wear and tear, presents progressive difficulties in defending itself, reacting, adapting, etc.
For several decades, there has been an aging of the world population linked to an increase in life expectancy, a fall in fertility rates and a decrease in mortality levels. This results in an increase in the average age of humanity .
As people live longer and, simultaneously, fewer and fewer people are born, the trend of population aging occurs. This generates various social and economic challenges as the number of retirees to whom the State must provide services grows, therefore increasing the state budget.
Human beings lead lives that have little in common with those of our most remote ancestors. Even those people who live in rural environments often use all kinds of artificial machines and technologies, without forgetting houses made from cement, brick and other materials that cannot be found in nature. This has many benefits in the short term, but it can lead to a series of harms when we reach old age.
Since most people do not play sports routinely, their physical condition in old age is usually very poor, and this leads to all kinds of bone and muscle problems, as well as disorders that do not seem to be directly related but that arise or worsen largely due to lack of physical activity. If we all kept our bodies healthy and constantly moving, aging would not be devastating.
Reaching seventy or eighty years with bone problems, with pain in various parts of the body, with cataracts or other vision disorders, with deafness, baldness and some of the many conditions that usually affect the elderly is without a doubt a kind of nightmare that any sane person would do everything possible to avoid. However, not everyone gets sick in old age, and one of the secrets is good nutrition .
Many experts assure that eating exclusively plant products is the key to a healthy and full life , far from the violence that comes with animal exploitation and the diseases associated with meat, eggs and milk. A vegetarian diet leads to a calmer life, since the body is cleaner and digestion proceeds smoothly.
Aging is a natural and inevitable phenomenon, which every living being should be prepared to go through. We, however, fear it and look for a way to combat it, as if it were a disease. Anti-aging treatments are the clearest example, and this group includes all types of medical interventions that do everything possible to delay the appearance of the typical signs of the passage of time.
The idea of aging can also be applied to different products and objects. The aging of wine and other alcoholic beverages, for example, is a process sought for the liquid to achieve certain properties derived from the passage of years.
The aging of technological resources , on the other hand, occurs when computers and other machines become obsolete due to the appearance of new devices with greater features. This means that old machines are no longer useful or efficient.