Why Americans Die So Much More Than Europeans
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
>"Psychologist Nancy Adler has demonstrated that how people rate how they are doing, relative to others, is at least as predictive of health or illness as are any objective measures such as actual income level, and research by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett has shown that by just about every health indicator—infant mortality, overall life expectancy, obesity, you name it— inequality can be even worse than poverty. In the Whitehall studies, Marmot found a fourfold difference in rates of cardiac disease mortality between the lowest and highest rungs of the British Civil Service, despite the fact they were all paid a living wage"
All of the outcomes based effects on death in this article are of course real, but it's astonishing that, according to the research of Sapolsky and others, inequality itself can cause stress and inflammation responses that can account for up to half of perceived difference in health outcomes.
American society by and large is simply significantly more stressed and it has real impact on the biology of the population.
[1]https://newrepublic.com/article/153870/inequality-death-amer...
One of these is the availability of highly-processed low-quality food everywhere and relative difficulty of getting higher quality food and finding the time to prepare proper meals. The substances used for conservation of foods such as sodium nitrate, sugars, etc. have overall adverse effects on health.
Moreover, the "food" industry doesn't stop here. They are trying to push the boundaries, and American institutions supposed to protect the rights of citizens are very weak when confronted with the lobbies. A good example is the infamous pink slime, approved by the FDA in 2001 but banned in the EU. Using these kinds of substances is considered a crime in Europe, and for a good reason.
Also, I know how unpopular this opinion is, but as someone who's lived in America, several European countries, and Australia... the average American has a lower standard of living than the average European, and the bottom of society in America tends to fall much lower than the bottom in a European city.
Life is more civilized in France, Italy, Spain than in the US. Sorry :D
I don't think this is unpopular at all, at least here. I've even avoided some nonessential medical care in the European country I live in due to the costs, and those prices would still be lower for nearly anything (with some exceptions) compared to in the US. I think this point is just not brought up here because it's well-enough understood in this audience that it's more useful to discuss other factors that might be more neglected, such as lifestyle, etc.
This is ridiculous. I've lived over a decade on both continents and it's not the number of miles/kilometers driven that matters, it's how terrible American drivers are. In the USA I see things every 15 minutes on the interstate that in Europe I would have called the police on.
American culture seems to have this endless desire to grow, improve, escalate, promote, hustle. It permeates every single aspect of life, from home buying to what is put on the dinner table.
Live fast, die young, I guess.
In any case, the principle point is that while you are correct that American's have a higher fatality rate, if we are also driving significantly more then that could be a bigger problem. If we have 4X the rate, but 10X the miles, it would seem reasonable to say that the distance is the biggest factor.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4112220/#SD1
In every single country I drove in, they are much worse than the average American driver. In some places, like Paris and Rome, they are much, much worse. I managed to survive in Paris and Rome, but only barely.
To this day, when driving in the US, I hold this knowledge in reserve, for those rare times when I do need to be more aggressive and “Drive Belgian”.
Two weeks ago I was in Italy, in one of the big cities, on a very heavily loaded cargo bike, and I made a mistake in a roundabout. Almost took the wrong exit and corrected too late. No problem — a car driver I cut off seemed to know the mistake before I did and slowed down to make space for me just in case.
If that's worse then the US, then the US must be heaven for cyclists.
For example, it’s hard to find a large multi-lane 4-way intersection in Italy where both roads are over 70km/h (45mph) , meaning there is a risk of a T collision if a driver goes through the red light.
In the US this kind of intersection is pretty common, which surprises me when I drive there.
The conversion of intersections to safer roundabouts also seems to be stuck at a low % in the US compared to Europe, Italy included.
you should try Rome or, dog forbid, New Delhi to see what bad driving looks like
Regulation prevents market forces from correcting the gap. For example, insurance cannot charge higher premiums based on weight or lifestyle health status.
Are you suggesting that obesity makes a difference in the US but not in Europe? Or perhaps that obesity varies in the US but is uniform in Europe?
Whereas what the report finds is a flat line for Europe and a sloped graph (higher up) for the US.
So, if you don’t have insurance in the US and you’re in a poor neighborhood, then yes — you’re likely to have a lower standard of care.
But in Europe, everyone has state-provided insurance, and the quality of healthcare is much more consistent.
There could be multiple factors overlapping here though I suspect. For all but the richest, public healthcare helps, but for the richest the obesity gap closes any benefit in healthcare (diminishing returns in better care easily overshadowed by even slightly worse lifestyles).
The fact that Americans are so obese it’s draining down their lifespan in a collective way is still something that sounds worthy of study.
I found this article (https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low) that shows a number of factors that contribute to the higher American mortality rate. Unfortunately it does not cover ALL causes of death, though if you want, you could independently investigate that[1]. Compared to Western Europe, Americans die at higher rates from smoking, obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, and road accidents. There are two other graphed factors that don't have an option to compare with "Western Europe", but on those, it's relatively plain that the United States has a significantly higher infant mortality rate and significantly less access to healthcare.
And then there are suicide rates, which have increased some in the United States, but which are middle of the road compared to European countries (France is higher, Germany's about the same, Italy, the UK, and Norway are lower... I did not check these exhaustively). You'll have to click the button on the graph to change the country and then add up the rate by each age to get a comparison. I suppose the middle-range American suicide rate didn't fit the narrative of the article, but the author still wanted to highlight it as a concern given that it's been going up in the United States.
(Unfortunately, not every graph shows the same set of countries compared to the United States, which makes me think the author chose to cherry pick countries for specific graphs, and I'm not sure why, because it doesn't seem necessary. For example, the graphs in the article allow you to choose additional countries and sometimes regions to add to the graph; if I add "Western Europe" to each graph where it's an available option, the trends that the author is illustrating are completely preserved.)
Strangely enough, the combined term (stillbirth + infant mortality) doesn't vary nearly as much. That says there's a big data problem with counting infant mortality, and thus a big data problem with life expectancy.
In the USA there is a poorer segment of society that has much worse healthcare than the equivalent in European countries.
This is because they do not have the good health insurance policies that are needed to have good healthcare; even with insurance they can't afford the deductibles. This is largely because richer Americans get their good health insurance from their good jobs. It is also because poorer people's lives are more chaotic because life is harder.
In Europe those people's lives are similarly chaotic due to the struggle of living on low income in a low income area, but they have access to good free healthcare in many countries, and fairer insurance schemes in others.
Doesn't it make sense to see life expectancy fall for every age category when every age category and group have to contend with the same byzantine and terrifying medical industrial complex to get even the most basic care?