Eye Muscle

When you approach middle age, your eye muscles tend to lose their ability to finely focus the lens.

EYES : The muscles tend to lose their ability to finely focus the lens as one approaches middle age. Eyesight that was 6/4 [ability to read at 6 metres what most people read at 4 metres] [20/15 feet] at 30 drops to 6/6 [20/20] at 50. Slight magnifying glasses might be needed for reading. At 60, people tend to become shotsighted when the inner part of the lens hardens and refracts rays to a focus just before the retina. Vision drops to 6/12 [20/40] and the retina's fine discrimination of colours is dulled, particularly with greens and pinks. Ophthalmologists like to point to Renoir's pink stage as an example. By 70 almost everyone has signs of cataracts, an opacity in the lens. The older, harder, clouded lenses scatter light haphazardly and glase becomes a problem.

Muscles Of Human

A young healthy man will have about 15% body fat and a woman 25%

WEIGHT : Muscles and other active tissues begin to die by about 0.5 per cent a year after 25 and are replaced by fat. But a combination of high-energy diets, less exercise in middle age and the slowing down of the basal metabolic rate [the rate at which the resting body convests fuel into energy] means that bodies are fed energy beyond their needs and tend to gain fat at a faster rate than they lose active tissue. So while the proportion of fat to muscle increases with age, so does overall weight, leading to the middle age spread between 35 and 65. A young healthy man will have about 15 per cent body fat and a woman 25 per cent. At 70 they will have double those amounts but after that overall weight seems to go down again, possibly because there are fewer fat people in statistics.