My Grandfather was a huge influence on my life. He shaped much of who I am today. I absolutely loved spending time with my Grandmother and him — watching Hockey Night in Canada while playing cribbage on a TV table in the living room. Great memories.

Grandma and he always were cautious with their money. He was an electrician with the local pulp & paper mill. He was hard-working but never earned more than $20,000 a year in his life.

I remember him commenting many times about how his friends or co-workers would buy a new boat or car every couple of years while he made do with his 10 year-old Chevy. While they were spending, he was saving.

As he hit his retirement years, Grandma and he had built up a nice little nest egg while his buddies complained they were broke. How could Grandpa afford to go to Europe while they had to stay home and couldn’t afford a new car again this year?

Delayed gratification.

It’s striking how this is an analogy for our health and the way we age.

Like my Grandfather’s spendthrift friends, today far too many people prematurely ‘spend’ their health. They eat crap and don’t exercise. Too many are overweight or obese. They are diabetic or pre-diabetic, many without even knowing it.

They lead a lifestyle that has a high probability of a bad and often premature end to their lives. Or they finally get around to paying attention to their diet and start an exercise regimen if they are one of the lucky ones to survive a heart attack.

But this isn’t really a big deal. They are only hurting themselves.

Or are they?

Most countries of the world are presently experiencing a long-term negative birth rate—people are dying faster than they are born. Demographers, those that study the effects of population growth into the future, predict that as a continent, North America is aging. While the wild card is immigration, we are going to see the average age of our population increase over the next 30 – 40 years.

This means an aging population will retire from work faster than new entrants come into the work force. And that translates into fewer people paying for the medical costs of a fast-growing group of golden-agers.

Aging itself doesn’t drive up healthcare costs. Disease does—and most of this is chronic degenerative disease, most of which is preventable with improved lifestyle choices.

So it does matter today when anyone opts for an unhealthy lifestyle. The long-term repercussions of their lifestyle choices will adversely affect not only their future, but our future and the future of our children and grandchildren. We are mortgaging the finances of future generations because of these poor choices.

My hope is that through education, the negative health trends across North America will reverse. Like my Grandfather understanding the importance of delayed gratification, we all need to understand the importance of paying the price for health today through good habits and discipline for a better-quality life to the end.