Does Aging Cause Hearing Loss?

Most doctors tell us that the hearing loss many of us suffer as we get older is inevitable. But Dr. John A. McDougall presents evidence to the contrary in his book, "The McDougall Program for a Healthy Heart." He notes that people in the Third World eating their traditional diets have better hearing at the age of 70 than the average American has at 20. These people live to a ripe old age with all of their senses intact, while many of us wear eyeglasses and hearing aids as we get older.

When scientists compared the hearing of the African tribespeople called Maabans with the people in Wisconsin, they couldn't find any of the Africans, at any age, with hearing losses like those common in Wisconsin, the dairy capital of the United States.

When scientists studied the Finnish people, who eat a high-fat diet with Yugoslavs, who had a much lower cholesterol level, they found Finnish children with hearing losses at the age of 10. By the age of 19, those young Finns had a marked inability to hear high frequency sounds. Yugoslav children had no such hearing loss.