Physical activity gives an outlet to stress, and people used to get way more of it. Stress and physical effort are supposed to go hand-in-hand; you feel stressed, which gives you a boost of adrenaline, which you need to physically fight back whatever caused the stress. When the physical component is missing, the stress just lingers and wreaks havoc on your body.

Also, sunlight exposure (with limited UV) went hand in hand. Now we have neither.

Careful. Exercise also causes a stress response in-and-of itself.

Work is not the same as stress. People today (especially near the bottom of the ladder) are not in control of their own destiny like they used to be. It's a different kind of stress.

Slaves were more on control of their own destinys than someone working an entry job today?

I was thinking more about farmers.

And they used to be more in control? Epidemics wiping out whole families? Gulags, concentration camps? Religious violence? Persistent threat of starvation death that was just the norm of life? One year of crop failures, and your kids are dead. Two years, and you are dead yourself. And it doesn't depend on you at all, just bad luck (if there was too much luck - like a generation without crop failures - population doubled, then just one year of crop failures meant you were dead). And yeah, the Church that keeps telling people that they were all sinners and will burn in hell, very comforting. Tell me about "control of one's own destiny".

I think there’s something to this. Life in those times was difficult and stressful, yes, but most hardships then were entirely beyond any individual’s control. To a large extent, good times and bad times would come and go regardless of what you did.

Contrast this to the modern day where more often than not, hardships are attributed to personal failings (“You should’ve worked harder if you didn’t want to be stuck working abusive under-compensated jobs!”) and people perpetually teeter on the edge of a knife suspended over a bottomless pit. If anything goes wrong, it’s treated as nobody’s fault but your own, regardless of the reality of the situation. It’s almost a type of psychological torture.

I think the idea is that the cells are stressed due to inflammation due to diet, rather than psychological feelings of stress

Average "healthy" body temperature is down more than half degree exactly because of reduction in inflammation. People used to have very unsanitary lives and were fighting infections nonstop. 37.0C was the "normal" body temperature when the "norm" was first discovered in the early XIX century, now it's considered to be a sickness already.

I'm not an expert but maybe keeping the immuno-army busy with constant infections keeps it from going bored and attacking itself

also not-an-expert opinion, but an average higher body temperature would reduce immune system workload by virtue of killing a lot of stuff dead via inhospitable environment before an immune reaction could ever muster..

Fascinating claim, where did you hear this?

well, you may read & discuss this one? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions_...

It's possible they had better support systems due to larger families, church being more prominent, etc.

Any form of positive community is helpful, religous or not. Just having caring neighbors is a boon to well-being.