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I heard about a study that women who own horses live longer. The comment below was "if you can afford a horse you can probably afford health insurance. It isn’t the horse "
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.”
What’s more depressing than American healthcare?
Canadian conservatives replacing theirs with the American system without a fight.
When I last visited Canada a group of old men were talking at the Canadian Tire about how long it takes to see a doctor. Were saying they need to start making people pay like they do in the States.
Don’t fall for that propaganda. We have both long waits and pay a ton of money in the US. It can be both. I’ve had bills up to $118,000 and it can take me a year to see a specialist. I can’t find a primary care doctor and it takes several months to get in with a temporary nurse practitioner instead.
It’s pathetic. We are willing choosing to let it go, despite being such a huge advantage of being Canadian
Wait are you guys going down the shitter too? Illegally migrating to canada has always been my backup plan
Oh yeah, we are. Pierre says privatization is cool, and like morons, the majority of Canada believes that this rendition of trickle down economics won’t line the pockets of the rich
the entire conservative agenda is to dismantle universal healthcare from the inside to prove that “it doesn’t work, we should privatize it”
Someone didn’t hear about the convoys
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.
It’s not “our” it’s per province. Alberta in my case.
It’s the provinces with an outrageously wealthy upper class. BC,
CalgaryAlberta, and Ontario are chock full of rich conservatives that want to replicate the American system in Canada so that they can rival their American peers.
It would be funny if the punchline wasn’t the first thing you read.
Edit, realized the second comment adds nothing too, enjoy the jpeg.
Heaven forbid life expectancy factors be TWO things!
Obviously easy access to healthcare AND a non corn syrup based diet are important factors in determining longevity.
Edit: Does anyone know what this category of logical fallacy is called? Basically the fallacy where a person incorrectly tries to attribute an outcome to a single cause.
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.
It is a lot easier to survive a heart attack and stroke if you can reach a hospital or comparable medical service in a reasonable amount of time.
Yes, that too, but the way it was explained to me is that high blood pressure, diabetes and easy to diagnose diseases which make up the majority. All solved by regular checkups
Look up food deserts and reconsider whether urban and rural citizens in America have the same diet.
Food deserts do exist in many places, but majority of people in my area need vehicle access to get any groceries, or work. One usually does not walk down to the local dollar general.
And with vehicles come access to real grocery stores
Food deserts in the south are worse than just “need to drive to a grocery store.” Often the only nearby (short drive) is a store akin to Dollar General with very little or no fresh produce. If the closest place you can get decent quality fruit and veggies is an hour drive, you’re going to end up on a diet of corn syrup.
And that is definitely an issue .
Here is another take, I think the mortality patterns would have differences per county based on how many towns and food stores there are. But I don’t see it, for example Lufkin would have a higher life expectancy because so much of that county is a metro area, but it does not stand out against the other counties
Causal oversimplification is a specific kind of false dilemma where conjoint possibilities are ignored.
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.
I mean its also the better food, American food is so stuffed with pointless corn syrup that Americans who spend time in Europe consistently lose weight even if they don’t change their eating habbits, the UK is going the same way so fast that I’m turning into a vegetarian because the meat in my price range is genuinely becomming cyberpunk levels of bad (It basically just tastes like starchy mush with no resemblence to meat in flavour or texture at this point)
It’s both? Mediterranean and Japanese diet are said to be the healthiest diet. There is a reason why Mediterranean and Japanese are the longest lived in comparison to everyone. If anyone isn’t convinced, compare with the Polynesians. They also eat lots of fish and coconuts like the Japanese, but they are some of the most obese in the world due to their wide adoption of ultra processed and fast foods.
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 heard this about the Japanese super centenarians but I have never heard it about France. Interesting.
There is also the whole “red wine is good for your health” bullshit from France too…
Not being obese, sedentary and full of processed food and soda is the key IMO, plus healthcare obviously.
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.
Also when every lead poisoned hillbilly and their toddlers don’t have unfettered access to firearms, that probably brings down life expectancy a little bit.
And I’m sure the massive over reliance on cars, the form of transit with the highest mortality rate, and freeway doesn’t help.
Nor the fact that every portion of food is enough to feed a small village for a week and is at least 10% corn syrup by mass.
Tbf diet is a factor, too. Not living in a food desert is a huge plus.
But seriously, the Mediterranean Diet is also a thing discussed in Europe while the north is wealthier and has better social security. Still, no one recommends the Scandinavian Diet or living without sunlight in winter. I still value the post as a meme. I don’t want to be the actually guy but just provide some context.
Didn’t someone prove that these statistics are all thrown off by pension fraud?
More so, we can replicate those diets and not see anything like the changes people claim come from just changing the diet.
The answer is and has always been “we’re all forced to work ourselves into early graves.” We can replicate everything except not working 80% of you adult awake hours, to be allowed to live.
As a culture, we just don’t have the courage to deal with that.
Wouldn’t surprise me
https://allthatsinteresting.com/blue-zones-supercentenarians
This is what I was remembering. The “blue zones” that supposedly have much longer life spans also coincidentally are rife with pension fraud.
And they walk a lot more
Move more. Eat better. Have better access to medical care and no stigma in using it.
There was also an article a while back that most “blue zones” (I think they were called) are probably BS with inconsistent and bad measurement.
The sociopath capitalists want us poories to be jealous of their concierge medicine based longevity to feel superior, but jokes on them, they made society so shitty and desperate that we see premature death as peace at last!
Checkmate, owner class!
Avg life expectancy at birth in the US is 78.5 years, and the highest avg life expectancy in the EU is Switzerland at 83.4 years, which is a difference of 4.9 years, not 15. Metabolic disorders driven by diet are absolutely the biggest contributor to mortality in the US. You should see the disgusting shit these people are willing to put in their bodies over and over. A lot of people just don’t remember not feeling shitty and are completely unaware their diet contributes to feeling bad.
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.
It would make more sense to compare the highest states/countries to each other and the lowest states/countries to each other, but even then you could keep comparing smaller regions and still just not come up with what you’re looking for. In the US, there’s way more poverty and people who subsist on absolute junk food 24/7. On the other hand, the life expectancy in NYC is over 85, and in my county in Texas it’s 82. There are lots of factors that go into this, and the meme above misses the mark
The Mediterranean diet doesn’t exist, these countries have longer life expectancies because they’re bad at reporting deaths and their governments think that they have a bunch of 110 year olds.
Of course, the dropping life expectancy in the US is almost certainly due to depression and lack of healthcare.
The researcher who debunked these so-called “blue zones” received an Ig Nobel prize this year.
That’s just the unusual prevalence of 100+ year olds, in the so called “blue zones.” Overall country life expectancy statistics aren’t thrown off by that type of fraud as much, because the vast majority of people don’t live anywhere close to 100, and these specific blue zones are a very small overall portion of the larger country.
For the most part, we can observe a correlation between wealth/income and life expectancy, where the blue zones are outliers on that general trend (both long lived and very poor). So there’s no reason to believe that these small communities are poisoning the overall stats in any significant quantity.
Yeah thats true. And I agree with the overall idea of better health care = longer life. Just wanted to reinforce that the whole “Mediterranean diet” thing is somewhat debunked.
No, the Mediterranean diet has plenty of evidence in favor, including actual interventions where groups were switched to the diet and studied compared to a control group, and had better health outcomes. Those studies, plus population-wide data, supports the idea that a Mediterranean diet improves longevity and health in general.
Infant mortality is a big reason our life expectancy is so low. Which is connected to how hard it is to see a doctor for lower income people.
Can confirm. Canadians eat like trash and are only 1 year below Italy.
Somebody I know was watching that TV show with Zac Efron claiming the people in an Itallian Village lived longer. I looked it up and that whole area has a lower percentage of elderly than average EU nations.
