HAPPILY, I’M HEALTHIER THAN MY DAD AND GRANDDADS WERE AT MY AGE: Middle-age Americans in 2017 are less healthy than prior generations: Study.

As Americans in their 50s move toward retirement age, many are in worse overall health than their peers in prior generations, researchers warn.

“We found that younger cohorts are facing more burdensome health issues, even as they have to wait until an older age to retire, so they will have to do so in poorer health,” said study author Robert Schoeni. He’s an economist and demographer at the University of Michigan.

Americans born in 1960 or later must wait until age 67 to collect their full Social Security benefit. People born before that were able to collect sooner.

Schoeni and his colleagues analyzed data collected over decades by the U.S. National Institute on Aging and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

They found that a higher percentage of Americans now in their 50s rated their own health as just fair or poor, compared with what older Americans said about their own health at a similar age.

Also, middle-aged Americans today say they suffer from a higher rate of memory and thinking problems, versus prior generations of 50-year-olds.

But I suspect that these self-reports are driven as much by expectations as by actual change. Prior generations expected to feel worse as they got older, and also expected people not to complain about it too much. Note that people’s actual physical abilities didn’t get worse.