Is Being Over 45 a "Health Condition?"

To celebrate my 110th birthday, I'd like to have one of my friends videotape me rollerskating in the park for me to post on uTube or someplace.

Having been a computer nut since the 70's, I am assuredly over 45. But I've seldom regarded that as a health condition. 55 then? Nope. Then how did this question come up?

When not drawing or painting pictures, I'm a writer, or pretend to be, and for some reason I sat down one day with the idea of writing an article about Taking Surveys Online. The idea was going to be to expose the whole industry as a giant scam and warn people away from getting involved with such nonsense. Being conscientious, however, it seemed appropriate to sign up with a few companies and get some objective data first. So I did a heap of research and came up with a few sites that seemed like good places to start.

Whether this was serendipitous or disastrous is not yet clear, but the first few I tried were so fun and interesting that they completely changed my outlook. Sure, there are many phony sites on the internet that pretend to be seeking valuable public input while they are actually harvesting as much personal information as they can get about individuals in order to target them for spam. But to my great surprise there are others which are innocuous at worst, and at best open one's eyes to a whole new way of looking at spare change.

So instead of doing a quick hatchet job on this industry, I next signed up with all of the seemingly honest survey sites I could find and began gathering data on them.

Turns out, this was not a job for the timid. One thing all of the survey companies have in common is a preoccupation with the survey taker's age, which helps them them partition people off into so-called interest groups. For some reason that may make sense to other people, but totally boggles my mind, since the interest groups assigned to people who are no longer wet behind the ears seem to be restricted pretty much to health conditions, alcoholic beverages, and luxury cars. Since I have little little or no familiarity with any of these subjects, it is easy for me to get disqualified quickly, but some of the researchers take a while to get around to their main point. As a result, this morning's survey, which turned out to be about health, startled me with listing, along with high blood pressure, high cholestrol, and low libido, the health condition: "OVER 45!" I checked off the "no" boxes for the other two conditions, "yes" on over 45 and got booted out, but was awarded a few points for trying. The real rewards were a) something different to write about in my blog, and b) yet another chance to confirm my belief that health conditions do not have to be an inevitable part of aging.

Speaking of avoiding undesirable health conditions, here is my Helium article warning people about the dangers of an artificial sweetener called Neotame:

http://www.helium.com/tm/580292/neotame-warningmy-personal-crusade