by Zoë Pollock
The average man's body fat rises from 23 per cent to 29 per cent over the fifth and sixth decades of his life, while women's will reach 38 per cent. We've always called it 'middle-aged spread', which is both accurate and vivid, though science calls it sarcopaenia. It's a dangerously deceptive process, since many men of sixty proudly tell you they weigh exactly the same now as they did at twenty-five. But this is irrelevant if much that was muscle is now fat, which it almost certainly is. The question you should ask yourself is: do you still have the same waist measurement now that you did at twenty-five?
A bright side:
Brain-imaging suggests that the young seem more inclined to favour either the left or right hemisphere of the brain when problem-solving, whereas the middle-aged brain, though slower, tends to work more as a whole. This again would constitute a kind of empirical-science confirmation of what common sense and common knowledge have told us for centuries: that the young are sharper yet often fail to 'see the whole picture', while the older have broader, fuzzier, perhaps more tolerant horizons. 'The middle-aged human brain', triumphantly concludes David Bainbridge, aged forty-two, 'is the most powerful, flexible thinking machine in the known universe.'
The Dish 