Professor Sarah Harper, director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, said using drugs to prevent the worst effects of lifestyle illnesses was likely to become more and more common in the future.
Cholesterol-lowering statins are already taken by up to seven million Britons deemed to be at a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, while some academics advocate those over 45 should take low-dose aspirin to help ward off cancer.
But, in a public lecture on the world's ageing population, Prof Harper last night (Tuesday) questioned whether the wholesale medicalisation of society was a good thing.
She wondered if taking the mantra of pharmaceutical prevention to the extreme would mean putting children with a high risk of developing heart disease in the future on statins.
She warned: "I think we may be entering a world where preventable chronic disease will not be prevented by public health measures tackling lifestyles, but increasingly by drug therapies which will control and reduce symptoms of chronic disease.
"We have to ask if we wish our future to be one where individuals at increasingly younger ages pop pills rather than eat healthily, stop smoking, reduce alcohol, and take up exercise. Do we want 10-year-olds popping statins?"
Prof Harper gave the Oxford London Lecture 2012, titled The 21st Century – the last century of youth? at the Church House Conference Centre in Westminster.
Speaking in advance of the lecture to The Daily Telegraph, she said that the chance of children taking statins was remote. But she noted academics were tending to recommend that people took preventative drugs at an earlier and earlier age.
She said: "Drug therapies are fantastic, but we have to be careful that we don't just have drugs where there are healthy living alternatives."
Taking drugs to combat chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes came at a cost, she said - both to the individual and the taxpayer.
"By all means over-eat and don't take any exercise, but in today's world you may find that means 20 years of chronic disability at the end of your life," she explained.
Evidence showed that those who lived healthier lifestyles had many more healthy years than those who did not, she said, something that popping pills alone could not achieve.
She said: "The problem is that public health initiatives that help us stay healthy are always put on the back burner."
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