Fast food addiction, free-refill-fueled soda addiction, tobacco addiction, weakly trained near universal use of automobiles for daily travel, and unequal access to healthcare are staples of American culture so I am only surprised the spread is not worse.
This has very little to do with location or genetics and everything to do with education and culture.
> Fast food addiction, free-refill-fueled soda addiction, tobacco addiction, weakly trained near universal use of automobiles for daily travel, and unequal access to healthcare are staples of American culture
Every one of those points is also true in Europe (apart from possibly healthcare), unfortunately. Car dependency and car-centric development is almost everywhere, places like the Netherlands are an outlier. Fast food and ads thereof are also everywhere. Many people smoke. Etc.
> Car dependency and car-centric development is almost everywhere
It's the degree of things. I live in Ireland, in a village of a few thousand people a few km outside the city, what you might call a "suburb" in the US. I don't even have a driver's license. It's rarely an issue and can go about my life by foot. bike, and public transport.
Never been to US but saying car centric development in Europe is similar to US sounds crazy to me. It's not just Netherlands. Vienna, Budapest, Stockholm, Barcelona, Germany and Switzerland... is it really true people in America take buses and trains as often as in those places? and they are also so well maintained? is it just propaganda that public transport in US sucks outside of maybe NYC
I get the feeling that Universal Healthcare (medicare for all) would probably level the difference? What else is responsible for the almost 4yr difference with e.g. France? Is it diet? Is the air/water worse in the US?
Probably a combination of Universal Healthcare, Food Regulations (from what I understand, food quality regulations in the US are lacking compared to the EU), more balanced cultural attitudes towards work-life balance, less car-focused cities and more walkable cities.
> I get the feeling that Universal Healthcare (medicare for all) would probably level the difference?
Sometimes my wife convince me to try American candy/foods that we buy in these "foreign foods stores" locally, because she grew up eating some of them in her country.
And every time we check the contents by reading the nutrition-labels or checking with apps like Yuka, it turns out that the stuff Americans put in the mouth and stomach are filled with stuff that is outright illegal to put in foods here in Europe.
So if I were to guess, it would be related to what is legal to put in foods/consumables.
There's lots of stuff like that, the way chickens and eggs are cleaned etc.
It sometimes is annyoying though, especially around foods and medicine when something is not yet approved in Europe e.g. It's really hard to get Allulose (sugar alternative with similar properties benefitting baking); As far as I can tell it's not actually "illegal" in Europe, it's just not approved as a food, so no-one risks importing it..
It's not just the universal healthcare enables access to healthcare to more people. When healthcare is something being paid for by everyone, the state of other people's health matters to you too (not just your own).
Therefore, things like public smoking bans (as we have in the UK) as well as public health campaigns around alcohol consumption and healthy eating become palatable. Regulating harmful foodstuffs becomes more important. The cost of smokers' adverse health was (and still is) enormous, and reducing that burden benefits everyone.
> Smokers actually cost less than non-smokers because they die a decade and a half sooner, and old age is where most expense happens.
This is often mentioned, but it's simply not true. It's not old age itself that costs money, it's the part of your life where you need care and support. This is old age in otherwise healthy people, but smokers don't just drop dead one day, they go through as many if not more years of care and support as everyone else, they just do it younger (which costs in lost productive years too).
What shocked me about the US when I went, was how much peptobismol people chugged down.
There was not one meal in my 1 week stay there that I could digest without issue.
Annual sales of Pepto Bismol look to be well under $0.50 per person, so while the American diet and food quality is appallingly worse than Europe, I suspect your one week of stomach upset is not be a great source from which to extrapolate.
Fair enough, maybe it was just the amount and variety of peptobismol products that I noticed were for sale everywhere. For example just in the Hotel where I was staying, they had a bunch chewable peptobismol gummy bears + the ordinary bottles for sale.
I doubt you can free healthcare your way out of obesity. You can't even healthcare your way out of obesity when you make it really, really personally expensive to be obese. And obesity is almost certainly the mortality bottleneck these days.
Obesity is primarily caused by the 1-2000 micro-decisions we make each year about what to eat, when, and how much. A free visit to the doctor now and then is just not going to move the needle much on that one way or another for most people, most of the time. Even if it could we have to ask why a $0 doctor visit would be so much more effective than a $100 doctor visit.
No, the effects you're seeing what Europeans are more fit than Americans on average is coming from somewhere else. I think the real answer is the obvious one: Food here in Europe is simply worse tasting than in the US in general. I've been here for 5 years across twice as many countries; I've never had a pizza here that even matches Little Caesar's back at home, in terms of lighting up my little monkey neurons, to say nothing of Costco. If I ever go back home I will break and get one of the two within a week of reaching the airport.
Capitalism is an optimization process that has optimized the heck out of food reward signal. Your only real options are either to be poor enough that capitalism doesn't care about getting you the 'good stuff' - easier said than done when being poor sucks, and when the good stuff is constantly getting cheaper over time anyway - or you fight back with even harder optimization in the reverse direction. You could argue Europe is some mixture of both compared to the US.
I think free healthcare means government wants ppl to be healthy. Unhealthy people literally take money from government's pocket, so gov uses various regulation against unhealthy stuff and does healthy lifestyle promotion
American baby boomers hobby in retirement is going out to eat as much as possible and drinking beer/wine. Or they travel to other countries to go out to eat as much as possible and drink beer/wine/cocktails.
All the baby boomer men in my family would be dead if it wasn't for the American health care system.
Even suffering heart attacks, they didn't miss a beat to get back to going out to eat, drinking beer/wine and being massively overweight.
If you go to any restaurant at night it will be packed with fat old people stuffing their face. Most on medications so that they don't have to change their lifestyle.
No country has ever had the BMI of old people that America has right now. It is a wealth curse.
Some of those you'd assume are to do with health care in general, but some (alcohol and tobacco consumption) are more like direct causes in and of themselves.
Comically, this is also basically a map of countries in Europe scored based on how convenient the existence of each country is to the kind of people who make us-europe comparisons
Take the absolute value and the numbers and you get an ok map of how likely someone is to be trying to mislead you if they're comparing all of the US to just this one nation.
You could make a pretty similar map with US states vs US average.
Any analysis like this that doesn’t factor in the East needing to catch up after 50 years of communist policies is misleading. I would be curious to see the improvement rate in say, Poland and Croatia over the last twenty years factored in and projected into the next two decades. Especially if we include economic success; Poland for example is probably going to be more economically successful than places like Portugal, if it isn’t already.
For Germany, it is instructive to compare detailled maps of life expectancy vs. household income. Both seem to be very much correlated.
A clear East vs. West and to a lesser extent North vs. South difference is obvious. In Western Germany, most region with very low life expectancy are those regions that were under strong economic pressure in recent decades (usually former mining areas, such as the Ruhr Area and the Saarland).
This. This picture only looks at current boomers which heavily favors those in western Europe who live like kings due to wealth, taxation and policies being catered towards them since they make a majority of the voters and caught the good times of economic growth and wealth building, but some of those economies kinda stagnated post 2008, which will mostly affect future generations of retirees not the current ones.
So I expect the picture of future retirees will look very different between countries with growing economies and the ones with declining/stagnating economies.
Sure it isn't a socialist country, but many Swiss policies would be considered socialist in US politics, eg: if you are sick/ill you receive 80% of your salary for 720 days.
The country I'm from and the country I'm living in right now are both "democratic socialist", has been called "socialist hellhole" by more people than I can count, and they both sit at +4.0 and +4.4.
So I guess the positive ones are the "democratic socialist" countries?
> Social democracy and democratic socialism are related but distinct political ideologies. Social democracy, often associated with the Nordic model, focuses on regulating capitalism to create a strong welfare state and reduce inequality through social programs, while generally supporting a mixed economy with private ownership. Democratic socialism, on the other hand, envisions a more fundamental transformation of the economic system, often including greater public or worker ownership and economic democracy, while also emphasizing democratic principles.
All countries in West Europe implement social democracies. They greatly outperform the US.
Countries in Eastern Europe are still enduring their legacy of communism/democratic socialism, but 30 years ago they experienced a radical swing towards the blend of neoliberalismo professed by the US.
Lastly, you look at data showing how the US greatly underperforms in key quality of life metrics, and the conclusion you opt to extract is cherry-pick those to look down on? That's tragic.
While genetics might play a small role for very specific reasons (eg a society thats prone to sickle cell disease will likely live shorter), there’s no such difference in large, diversified populations like US/Europe.
And most of the US gets a lot more sun exposure than most of europe. Also African americans...Well just black people in this context are more than twice as likely to get prostate cancer (more like 3 times given lower detection i've heard it said) supposedly because they have higher testosterone.
Not many ancestrally native Americans in Europe, relatively few jews compared to the USA (but more other semetic groups, I don't know if that balances or not), the sub-saharan Africans in Europe had a lot more volunteers and less industrialised human trafficing and are in any case very much more diverse genetically than people think due to superficial characteristics like skin colour (seriously, substitute race discussion about skin to be about blonde vs brunette to see how silly the groups are), and there's more of Irish in the US than the current population of Ireland.
What typical Reddit ignorance that compares the avg life expectancy of the whole USA with a range of 68 years for tribal people to 85 years for “Asians”, a 17 year spread, to individual European countries.
It has always baffled me a bit that Europeans keep making this basic type error, by comparing individual European countries that were relatively cohesive and healthy until recently, to the whole of the USA that suffers from a whole host of benefits of diversity. Europeans simply have no understanding of the real America beyond what they see in movies or hear on Reddit. How could they, most people in America don’t even have a clue what America really is like due to endless barrages of propaganda from childhood on.
> by comparing individual European countries that were relatively cohesive and healthy until recently
The first one doesn't include a few European countries. The second is completely backwards - health generally has been on the way up across the board for decades.
Fast food addiction, free-refill-fueled soda addiction, tobacco addiction, weakly trained near universal use of automobiles for daily travel, and unequal access to healthcare are staples of American culture so I am only surprised the spread is not worse.
This has very little to do with location or genetics and everything to do with education and culture.
Europeans smoke more than Americans
Fact. However the top smokers like Serbia also score lower on life expectancy
> Fast food addiction, free-refill-fueled soda addiction, tobacco addiction, weakly trained near universal use of automobiles for daily travel, and unequal access to healthcare are staples of American culture
Every one of those points is also true in Europe (apart from possibly healthcare), unfortunately. Car dependency and car-centric development is almost everywhere, places like the Netherlands are an outlier. Fast food and ads thereof are also everywhere. Many people smoke. Etc.
> Car dependency and car-centric development is almost everywhere
It's the degree of things. I live in Ireland, in a village of a few thousand people a few km outside the city, what you might call a "suburb" in the US. I don't even have a driver's license. It's rarely an issue and can go about my life by foot. bike, and public transport.
Never been to US but saying car centric development in Europe is similar to US sounds crazy to me. It's not just Netherlands. Vienna, Budapest, Stockholm, Barcelona, Germany and Switzerland... is it really true people in America take buses and trains as often as in those places? and they are also so well maintained? is it just propaganda that public transport in US sucks outside of maybe NYC
I get the feeling that Universal Healthcare (medicare for all) would probably level the difference? What else is responsible for the almost 4yr difference with e.g. France? Is it diet? Is the air/water worse in the US?
Probably a combination of Universal Healthcare, Food Regulations (from what I understand, food quality regulations in the US are lacking compared to the EU), more balanced cultural attitudes towards work-life balance, less car-focused cities and more walkable cities.
These are all universal across the EU and yet there's big differences between EU countries.
Food regulations doesn't mean people have a healthy diet. A lot of the Eastern Europe countries have higher obesity rates: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
> I get the feeling that Universal Healthcare (medicare for all) would probably level the difference?
Sometimes my wife convince me to try American candy/foods that we buy in these "foreign foods stores" locally, because she grew up eating some of them in her country.
And every time we check the contents by reading the nutrition-labels or checking with apps like Yuka, it turns out that the stuff Americans put in the mouth and stomach are filled with stuff that is outright illegal to put in foods here in Europe.
So if I were to guess, it would be related to what is legal to put in foods/consumables.
The US ranks 3rd in quality and safety, with scores pretty similar to pretty much every European country
https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/project/food-sec...
There's lots of stuff like that, the way chickens and eggs are cleaned etc.
It sometimes is annyoying though, especially around foods and medicine when something is not yet approved in Europe e.g. It's really hard to get Allulose (sugar alternative with similar properties benefitting baking); As far as I can tell it's not actually "illegal" in Europe, it's just not approved as a food, so no-one risks importing it..
... Such as?
It's not just the universal healthcare enables access to healthcare to more people. When healthcare is something being paid for by everyone, the state of other people's health matters to you too (not just your own).
Therefore, things like public smoking bans (as we have in the UK) as well as public health campaigns around alcohol consumption and healthy eating become palatable. Regulating harmful foodstuffs becomes more important. The cost of smokers' adverse health was (and still is) enormous, and reducing that burden benefits everyone.
Smokers actually cost less than non-smokers because they die a decade and a half sooner, and old age is where most expense happens.
The true issue is secondhand smoke. That for me is what it all is about: preventing unwilling people from being exposed to smoke, full stop.
About as many people die from smoking than from secondhand smoke. Think for a minute how horrifying that is.
> Smokers actually cost less than non-smokers because they die a decade and a half sooner, and old age is where most expense happens.
This is often mentioned, but it's simply not true. It's not old age itself that costs money, it's the part of your life where you need care and support. This is old age in otherwise healthy people, but smokers don't just drop dead one day, they go through as many if not more years of care and support as everyone else, they just do it younger (which costs in lost productive years too).
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cost-of-smoking-t...
Surely it is not just healthcare and air/water as for example Scotland has life expectancy that is worse by two years comparing to England: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
My understanding for Scotland/England it is a question of alcohol/drugs to some degree. I suspect it is similar for the comparison to US.
Food, I believe it's obvious. France obesity rate is also lower than the US.
Large portion of americans eat like they have free healthcare.
This has got to be a massive factor.
What shocked me about the US when I went, was how much peptobismol people chugged down. There was not one meal in my 1 week stay there that I could digest without issue.
Annual sales of Pepto Bismol look to be well under $0.50 per person, so while the American diet and food quality is appallingly worse than Europe, I suspect your one week of stomach upset is not be a great source from which to extrapolate.
Fair enough, maybe it was just the amount and variety of peptobismol products that I noticed were for sale everywhere. For example just in the Hotel where I was staying, they had a bunch chewable peptobismol gummy bears + the ordinary bottles for sale.
Much of europe does have universal healthcare, but it is done internally to each european country.
That means poorer countries tend to have worse healthcare, and less good outcomes.
The divide you see in this map is more like Soviet infrastructure versus western infrastructure and Eastern approach to alcohol and nutrition.
It’s much more than money.
At best about half. Compared to UK, roughly other half of gap is drug overdoses, car crashes and firearm deaths
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/americans-die-younger-than...
I doubt you can free healthcare your way out of obesity. You can't even healthcare your way out of obesity when you make it really, really personally expensive to be obese. And obesity is almost certainly the mortality bottleneck these days.
Obesity is primarily caused by the 1-2000 micro-decisions we make each year about what to eat, when, and how much. A free visit to the doctor now and then is just not going to move the needle much on that one way or another for most people, most of the time. Even if it could we have to ask why a $0 doctor visit would be so much more effective than a $100 doctor visit.
No, the effects you're seeing what Europeans are more fit than Americans on average is coming from somewhere else. I think the real answer is the obvious one: Food here in Europe is simply worse tasting than in the US in general. I've been here for 5 years across twice as many countries; I've never had a pizza here that even matches Little Caesar's back at home, in terms of lighting up my little monkey neurons, to say nothing of Costco. If I ever go back home I will break and get one of the two within a week of reaching the airport.
Capitalism is an optimization process that has optimized the heck out of food reward signal. Your only real options are either to be poor enough that capitalism doesn't care about getting you the 'good stuff' - easier said than done when being poor sucks, and when the good stuff is constantly getting cheaper over time anyway - or you fight back with even harder optimization in the reverse direction. You could argue Europe is some mixture of both compared to the US.
I think free healthcare means government wants ppl to be healthy. Unhealthy people literally take money from government's pocket, so gov uses various regulation against unhealthy stuff and does healthy lifestyle promotion
I don't see why that would work better than having the unhealthy people literally take the money out of their own pocket.
American baby boomers hobby in retirement is going out to eat as much as possible and drinking beer/wine. Or they travel to other countries to go out to eat as much as possible and drink beer/wine/cocktails.
All the baby boomer men in my family would be dead if it wasn't for the American health care system.
Even suffering heart attacks, they didn't miss a beat to get back to going out to eat, drinking beer/wine and being massively overweight.
If you go to any restaurant at night it will be packed with fat old people stuffing their face. Most on medications so that they don't have to change their lifestyle.
No country has ever had the BMI of old people that America has right now. It is a wealth curse.
Would probably level the difference of what? This is rich countries vs poor countries. You can get an identical result over a US map:
https://www.nationhoodlab.org/the-regional-geography-of-u-s-...
Terrible Maps “Literally every US statistic ever”:
https://x.com/TerribleMaps/status/1933586469207036321
Let's all go to San Marino!
I think the proximal answers for "why" are in the World Health Report, which tells you why people die.https://www.who.int/data/gho/publications/world-health-stati...
Some of those you'd assume are to do with health care in general, but some (alcohol and tobacco consumption) are more like direct causes in and of themselves.
Comically, this is also basically a map of countries in Europe scored based on how convenient the existence of each country is to the kind of people who make us-europe comparisons
Take the absolute value and the numbers and you get an ok map of how likely someone is to be trying to mislead you if they're comparing all of the US to just this one nation.
You could make a pretty similar map with US states vs US average.
Correlation is a hell of a drug[1].
[1] https://m.xkcd.com/1138/
Do Europeans migrate to a similar extent that Americans do?
Any analysis like this that doesn’t factor in the East needing to catch up after 50 years of communist policies is misleading. I would be curious to see the improvement rate in say, Poland and Croatia over the last twenty years factored in and projected into the next two decades. Especially if we include economic success; Poland for example is probably going to be more economically successful than places like Portugal, if it isn’t already.
You can really see when things changed - newborn life expectancy in Poland https://obserwatorgospodarczy.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/...
For Germany, it is instructive to compare detailled maps of life expectancy vs. household income. Both seem to be very much correlated.
A clear East vs. West and to a lesser extent North vs. South difference is obvious. In Western Germany, most region with very low life expectancy are those regions that were under strong economic pressure in recent decades (usually former mining areas, such as the Ruhr Area and the Saarland).
Here is a 2020 map of life expectancy: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/media/13419_main.png
And here a 2019 map of household income: https://www.wsi.de/de/einkommen-14582-einkommen-im-regionale...
Differences is smoking might also have an important impact. Here is a 2013 map: https://bilder.deutschlandfunk.de/FI/LE/_f/47/FILE_f4790b165...
This seems to imply an even closer correlation.
Of course, correlation does not imply direct causation. The underlying causalities might be various, complex and different from region to region.
This. This picture only looks at current boomers which heavily favors those in western Europe who live like kings due to wealth, taxation and policies being catered towards them since they make a majority of the voters and caught the good times of economic growth and wealth building, but some of those economies kinda stagnated post 2008, which will mostly affect future generations of retirees not the current ones.
So I expect the picture of future retirees will look very different between countries with growing economies and the ones with declining/stagnating economies.
Spot the "democratic socialist" countries.
You mean social democracy?
Those are basically all in yellow on that map.
The countries with strong social-democratic parties are not the ones you think they are.
Switzerland appears to have the highest of them all, and certainly isn’t socialist, although it’s definitely democratic.
How is its safety net? My Swiss colleagues say there’s decent support re: housing, etc
San Marino has a +6.4
Ah I didn’t see that. It also looks like Andorra is above Switzerland.
That said, those are two micro states, so I’m not sure how applicable they are to larger countries. Switzerland isn’t huge but it also isn’t tiny.
The one near Switzerland is Liechtenstein
Microstates seem to do great, I also missed Monaco with a +7.1, Andorra is between France and Spain with a +4.7
Sure it isn't a socialist country, but many Swiss policies would be considered socialist in US politics, eg: if you are sick/ill you receive 80% of your salary for 720 days.
The country I'm from and the country I'm living in right now are both "democratic socialist", has been called "socialist hellhole" by more people than I can count, and they both sit at +4.0 and +4.4.
So I guess the positive ones are the "democratic socialist" countries?
Courtesy of AI:
> Social democracy and democratic socialism are related but distinct political ideologies. Social democracy, often associated with the Nordic model, focuses on regulating capitalism to create a strong welfare state and reduce inequality through social programs, while generally supporting a mixed economy with private ownership. Democratic socialism, on the other hand, envisions a more fundamental transformation of the economic system, often including greater public or worker ownership and economic democracy, while also emphasizing democratic principles.
All countries in West Europe implement social democracies. They greatly outperform the US.
Countries in Eastern Europe are still enduring their legacy of communism/democratic socialism, but 30 years ago they experienced a radical swing towards the blend of neoliberalismo professed by the US.
Lastly, you look at data showing how the US greatly underperforms in key quality of life metrics, and the conclusion you opt to extract is cherry-pick those to look down on? That's tragic.
Isn't it simply because of race?
While genetics might play a small role for very specific reasons (eg a society thats prone to sickle cell disease will likely live shorter), there’s no such difference in large, diversified populations like US/Europe.
I guess pale people and/or bald people could die younger due to skin cancer? I know I need to be really careful since losing my hair.
And most of the US gets a lot more sun exposure than most of europe. Also African americans...Well just black people in this context are more than twice as likely to get prostate cancer (more like 3 times given lower detection i've heard it said) supposedly because they have higher testosterone.
Between USA and western Europe? Is there a difference?
Not many ancestrally native Americans in Europe, relatively few jews compared to the USA (but more other semetic groups, I don't know if that balances or not), the sub-saharan Africans in Europe had a lot more volunteers and less industrialised human trafficing and are in any case very much more diverse genetically than people think due to superficial characteristics like skin colour (seriously, substitute race discussion about skin to be about blonde vs brunette to see how silly the groups are), and there's more of Irish in the US than the current population of Ireland.
Probably loads of other differences too.
You'd really need to say what you mean by that. Otherwise just throwing it out like that sure seems like a dogwhistle.
Did you mean a race towards the end of one's life?
What typical Reddit ignorance that compares the avg life expectancy of the whole USA with a range of 68 years for tribal people to 85 years for “Asians”, a 17 year spread, to individual European countries.
It has always baffled me a bit that Europeans keep making this basic type error, by comparing individual European countries that were relatively cohesive and healthy until recently, to the whole of the USA that suffers from a whole host of benefits of diversity. Europeans simply have no understanding of the real America beyond what they see in movies or hear on Reddit. How could they, most people in America don’t even have a clue what America really is like due to endless barrages of propaganda from childhood on.
> comparing individual European countries that were relatively cohesive and healthy until recently, to the whole of the USA
Isn't USA a country? How is a country-by-country comparison "typical Reddit ignorance"?
I'm gonna use my typical Reddit ignorance to guess you are indeed from the USA.
Because each state in the US has it's own flavor of regulation impacting most of the factors that affect life expectancy most greatly.
Your access to booze, cigs and healthcare is very different in NM than it is in MA.
It's not europeans making these maps. It's Americans trying to mislead other Americans by playing fast and loose with stats.
> by comparing individual European countries that were relatively cohesive and healthy until recently
The first one doesn't include a few European countries. The second is completely backwards - health generally has been on the way up across the board for decades.
If you are allowed to pick your samples, Corsican women are doing well in terms of life expectancy.
What secret America are you referring to? Could you shed us some light on it?