Victoria's secret

When a 21st Century person describes living, or working conditions as "Victorian", you can be pretty sure it's not meant as a complement. Think dark satanic mills and stunted, malnourished workers subsisting on thin gruel.

But maybe we need to re-examine our preconceptions, at least if we're comparing life today with life in the mid-Victorian period (1850-1880):

Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours...

...contrary to historical tradition, we argue in this paper, using a range of historical evidence ... Britain and its world-dominating empire were supported by a workforce, an army and a navy comprised of individuals who were healthier, fitter and stronger than we are today...

...Our recent research indicates that the mid-Victorians’ good health was entirely due to their superior diet. This period was, nutritionally speaking, an island in time; one that was created and subsequently squandered by economic and political forces...

...with the exception of family planning, the vast edifice of twentieth century healthcare has not enabled us to live longer but has in the main merely supplied methods of suppressing the symptoms of degenerative diseases which have emerged due to our failure to maintain mid-Victorian nutritional standards.

How the Mid-Victorians Worked, Ate and Died, by Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham

Clayton and Rowbotham seem to have identified a Goldilocks period. Before the 1850s, the Corn Laws and the crop blights of the Hungry Forties kept many people too hungry to be healthy. After about 1880, a move towards cheap, low-quality foods (fatty canned meats, cheap sugar, all manner of adulteration of basic foodstuffs, etc), along with cheap booze and that new, convenient, nicotine delivery system, the cigarette, meant that many people were ingesting too much unhealthy stuff to stay well.

Add the mid-Victorians' high levels of physical activity to their wholesome food, and you're looking at a recipe for a fairly healthy life. Something to ponder, as you pour some milk onto your sugary processed breakfast cereal before a sedentary day involving way too much screen time.