Life expectancy

It's pathetic. We are willing choosing to let it go, despite being such a huge advantage of being Canadian

I hear this a lot but where is it happening? Definitely not in the discussion in NS.

Dont get me wrong, fuck the PCs but I havent seen any real evidence of replacing our public medical system.

In East Texas the further one is away from Houston the less their life expectancy. We all eat the same stuff, I think. The difference maxes out to 5 years average less per person, near Louisiana, but if you look at the actuary stats it’s a straight line correlation between medical center distance and how long we live, on average

This honestly is repeated for many states in the USA. The metro areas have same life expectancies as Europe and Japan, but it’s balanced out by rural lack of access and fewer preventative cares.

Causal oversimplification is a specific kind of false dilemma where conjoint possibilities are ignored.

Reductionism? Oversimplification?

Einstein supposedly said "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"

Yes but life expectancy has been rising in those countries despite worse diets and obesity rising. So it seems access to healthcare is a stronger factor.

It is not two things, it is several things. Life expectancy in the US is lower mainly because of one thing though.

Essentially yes but it's not the underlying cause, as it wouldn't also be true in places with free at the point of use healthcare.

The group "women who own horses" will, on average, be wealthier of course. However, it will contain an abnormally large group of people who can afford not to work.

Wealth is the biggest indicator of life expectancy. Adjusting for healthcare costs, the change happens when people earn enough passively to not work or significantly reduce their hours to a very small number.

Imo, the answer is "we're all forced to work ourselves into early graves, unless you can afford to live off of other people working themselves into an early grave for you."

By aspiring to own a horse or live by the water or whatever, you can accidentally afford healthcare too!

Edit, realized the second comment adds nothing too, enjoy the jpeg.

POV: MFW when there's a paywall on 70th birthday

Paywalls: something foreign countries don’t lock 70th birthdays behind

And they walk a lot more

Didn't someone prove that these statistics are all thrown off by pension fraud?

Ha ha yeah I don't pay anything.

Have to pay upfront though before I get it all back (you don't have to if you are poor enough), that dental work made a hole in my account for two weeks... but getting 800€ back is sweet too.

It's thousands of tiny little things, pushing and pulling lifespans up and down.

As the screenshot notes, it's both diet and access to healthcare.

It's also other lifestyle factors, like amount of walking or driving, amount of alcohol consumed, tobacco use, etc.

It's social and economic factors, like income, education levels, employment status, type of job, disability status, marital status, number of close friends.

It's mental health issues, and related statistics like suicide rates, substance abuse rates, etc.

There are environmental factors, like environmental exposure to certain hazards or pollution, sunlight exposure, altitude, certain illnesses isolated to certain climates, maybe things like localized microbiomes (although those are also correlated with foods eaten and things like that).

There are also genetic factors for individual families or potentially ethnic groups.

And perhaps the one that can't be ignored entirely is just plain old recordkeeping. Some places have high rates of people living past 100, but don't seem to have much in the way of a lifestyle or environmental explanation, and may more accurately trace back to unreliable birth records 80+ years ago such that people might be mistakenly reported as living longer than they actually did.

And apparently westernized diets are catching up with the Japanese, so much so that there are cases of people in their 90s still going strong, but taking care of their decrepit children in their 70s.

Turns out it is all bullshit anyway. The Mediterranean and Japanese diet fads were based off reported life expectancy figures. It turns out that the longer life expectancy is due to poor government records and widespread pension fraud in these areas. A Nobel prize was awarded for uncovering these issues. A number of other studies that purported that olive oil was key to a healthy heart were later retracted for bad science.

I'm pretty sure the Greek and Japanese longest living people were achieving their age less through diet and more through pension fraud. They live as long as equally wealthy places if they were born after good birth records started being kept

The Polynesians have sugar cane which has caused them health problems since before they had access to processed food, Japan is too far north for sugar cane.

Bad measurements, cases contrary to the researcher's point were excluded, the biggest factor in places with too many people over age 100 was pension fraud - 40 year olds claimed to be 60 to get a pension, 40 years later they're 80 year olds pretending to be 100

If you are comparing a single country in Europe to the US the comparison should be at the state level.

Mississippi is the lowest state and close to 70 years in 2020. So if the comparison is the lowest US state to highest European state then you get a gap that is close to 15 depending on what year's data is being compared.

A better comparison would be all of the US to all of Europe since we vary so much from state to state just like Europe varies from country to country.

100%

Metabolic syndrome is the modern plague

Source: https://theconversation.com/the-data-on-extreme-human-ageing-is-rotten-from-the-inside-out-ig-nobel-winner-saul-justin-newman-239023

The researcher who debunked these so-called "blue zones" received an Ig Nobel prize this year.