![]() may contribute to Americans shorter lifespan. A lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables in the U.S. Even the way cities are designed makes access to good food more difficult.Ī fruit seller at Dom Pedro market in Coimbra, central Portugal. But there’s also higher child poverty, racial segregation, social isolation, and more. Yes, Americans eat more calories and lack universal access to health care. “In every one of those five buckets, we found problems that distinguish the United States from other countries.” The panel looked at American life and death in terms of the public health and medical care system, individual behaviors like diet and tobacco use, social factors like poverty and inequality, the physical environment, and public policies and values. “We were very systematic and thorough about how we thought about this,” says Woolf. The researchers were charged with documenting how Americans have more diseases and die younger and to explore the reasons why. ![]() “We were trying to just say – look, this is an American problem.” Digging into the ‘why’ population does worse than the top proportion of other populations,” she explains. “That was a decision – not to emphasize the differences in our population, because there is data that actually shows that even the top proportion of the U.S. That’s why, says Eileen Crimmins, professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California who was also on the panel that produced the report, they made a deliberate choice to focus on the health of the U.S. After looking across different age and racial and economic and geographic groups, he says, “what we found was that this problem existed in almost every category we looked at.” had a shorter life expectancy than people in other countries,” says Woolf, who chaired the committee that produced the report. “We went into this with an open mind as to why it is that the U.S. health disadvantage” – the fact that living in America is worse for your health and makes you more likely to die younger than if you lived in another rich country like the U.K., Switzerland or Japan. The researchers catalog what they call the “U.S. It goes on: “Even Americans with healthy behaviors, for example, those who are not obese or do not smoke, appear to have higher disease rates than their peers in other countries.” ![]() “American children are less likely to live to age 5 than children in other high-income countries,” the authors write on the second page. But the picture painted in the “Shorter Lives” report could shock even those who feel like they know the story. It can seem easy to brush that off as another scold about eating more vegetables and getting more exercise. Beyond bad habitsĪmericans are used to hearing about how their poor diets and sedentary lifestyles make their health bad. ![]() Ten years later, here’s a look back at what that eye-popping study found, and why the researchers involved believe it’s not too late to turn the trends around. American life expectancy is lower than that of Cuba, Lebanon, and Chechnya. In the years since, the trends have worsened. The authors tried to sound an alarm, but found few in the public or government or private sectors were willing to listen. ![]()
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