Posted on 11/24/2013 7:05:36 AM PST by LS
Yesterday I heard a quack health foods doc on the radio repeat something we hear a great deal, only he claimed to have a source for it, namely that the U.S. is down the list in life expectancy among developed nations.
Supposedly this was a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association.
I have some ideas as to why this may be (if indeed true) but I'd like some Freepers involved in medicine/insurance or other health-related fields to weigh in. What would account for the US having shorter life spans than, say, places such as Denmark or France?
I’ve often read that the disparity comes at the point of basic data collection. For example, some nations don’t count infant and child deaths against the average. If one nation counts a dead infant against the lifetime longevity average and another country does not account for deceased infants at all, the resulting “average lifespans” will be wildly skewed and not reflective of reality.
Some info here
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lifexpec.htm
Unfortunately, many illegals are of poor health, and that drives down the numbers.
Processed food and it’s abundance...I think in other nations they cook their own meals more. I was going to suggest food stamps...too
For America it depends what particular demographic is or is not included in the statistic. The tremendous growth in Third World peoples in the U.S. will lower a gross average or longevity rate. The delusion that all Third Worlders are Americans(i.e. the media report of an “...Ali Khazami, famous St. Paul American says....”) distorts any statistical analysis.
Americans drive more than any other country, driving more = more car accident deaths. And teenagers & early 20’s are most likely to die in an accident. This lowers our Life expectancy
We also have Blacks, who tend to murder each other. Blacks also just don’t live as long as other races. Just plain genetics. They pull our numbers down. However, Blacks in America have a longer life span here than anywhere else.
France is practically invaded by the Muslim hordes, however.
It may be liked a lot of other stats if you compare (just an example from off the top of my head) Norway to America we look bad; but if you compared Norway to Norwegian-Americans no big difference.
I do remember hearing that the demographic groups of people with the longest average life expectancy were women in Utah and women in Japan; they live to be quite old as a matter of course and (iirc) both groups have very low breast cancer rates (or maybe any kind of cancer, not sure).
I’d have to guess the both groups live healthy lives, although maybe in slightly different ways.
The Utah group would be esp. interesting to study because they would have a more diverse ethnic background that the Japanese.
My genealogy research has caused me to seriously question longevity numbers.
I’m finding a lot of male ancestors in the 1600s living well into their 80s. The highest mortality rate was among children under 10 years old with frontier women having a very high death rate which I attribute to them spending so many years pregnant.
Some 800+ highway deaths in Michigan this year.
Life expectancy is not necessarily an indication of the overall health of the population.
I agree with you. How our ancestors lived such comparatively long lives amazes me. For instance, my great, great, great grandfather was born in 1760. He joined Gen. Washington when he was 15 years old, was captured by the British and contacted smallpox, but was finally released and lived till 1841. That is 81 years and I have his family Bible to prove it.
Similar stats show American health care rated just below Costa Rica...
Interesting topic…especially if you throw violent deaths, war deaths, natural disaster deaths, abortion deaths, infant mortality into the population of stats large and small for “developed” and non-”developed” nations.
Who is the collector and distributor of said stats? What is their agenda when introducing said stats? Where are the standards for statistical record keeping on said topics. Are they uniform among nations? Is there punishment for falsifying statistics? (arthur andersen) What are we paying them to do this and why? (Unemployment numbers before elections)
Sheesh, this alone could develop into one huge bureaucracy/collective and cost the non-statkeepers lots of money.
enjoy - life - individual
One article I saw says Japanese don’t die because relatives keep collecting their pensions.
A similar issue affects infant mortality statistics. Many countries do not include infants who die shortly after delivery, especially premature infants, in their “infant mortality.” The United States does.
You are attempting to compare apples and oranges due in large part to differing criteria concerning infant mortality.
The Amish killing other Amish is a cause.
You need to understand math to suss this out.
If you are talking about AVERAGE then the numbers are skewed by the extremes. For example, if Bill Gates walks into a room, the average wealth of everyone in the room goes up astronomically.
Likewise, if a country has a high infant/child mortality rate, this will skew the numbers way downward since you are averaging in very low numbers with all the median numbers and high numbers.
The same thing is true of those who say that men don’t live as long ON AVERAGE as women in the USA. Two things make that true but don’t tell the real truth.
1. Male babies die at a higher rate than female babies
2. Young males (15-25) die at higher rate than young females (car accidents, accidents in general, military service). This used not to be true when young women died more often in childbirth or from complication from childbirth (sepsis), but the advent of modern medicine and antibiotics changed that.
So that is how they arrive at the women live longer than men on average. If you start averaging after people have reached age 50, men and women have a more equal rate of longevity. This is because all the low age numbers are eliminated from the averages.
It’s just math.
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