Widespread obesity, poor diet, sedentary lifestyles, the uniquely inefficient health care system, wealth inequality, etc, will likely cause overall expectancy to drop further.
Related and interesting:
> "As of 2010, the average, upper-income 50-year-old man was expected to live to 89. But the same man, if he's lower income, would live to just 76, according to the report."
Unimproving: Infrastructure in the US is falling apart, often literally. Nobody wants to pay for bridges, roads, sewers, or flood protection. It's like a return to the 1800s before any of this stuff existed.
Uneducating: The "fake news" problem is the tip of the iceberg. People are celebrating their ignorance as if it's a good thing, that being educated is to lose touch with the real world. It's telling that the flat-earth community, filled with offensive levels of pride in stupidity, thrives in the US.
Unearning: Children are often earning far less than their parents because they're forced into crappy part-time jobs or minimum wage temp work. Those lifetime jobs that parents got in a union or a big enterprise are all but extinct.
I was kind of wondering how this didnt happen earlier.
I have been to US 3 times. NYC, Vegas, San Fran, Los angeles etc. and one thing I noticed was how unhealthy alot of americans lived compared to europe.
Obsese parents together with children as small as 6 years old were all dining at fast-food restaurants eating massive amount of food. The kids were very obese too.
The entire culture seemed for _me_ as its rather normal to eat your dinner at kfc or mcdonalds than making food at home. When we took the flight fra NYC to Vegas we noticed there were more obese people than "regular sized". But when we took fra SF to London it was opposite.
And whats up with the size of the meals served in restaurants? its huuge. alot food for little money. Sometimes we split one dish in between us because it was too much for a single person. The same when we went to movies, we got to choose size of coke and popcorn. So we picked medium coke. Medium is like extra-large in europe.
I think its sad because americans are missing out on really great food. It is the food you cook yourself thats not only healthy but tastes so much better and authentic.
I hope nobody is offended my post but I just felt its an area to improve on.
I agree with most of your post as I am fortunate to have been exposed to food cultures outside the US, but I disagree with this point. Many people either can't or won't cook food that is "authentic" to any reasonable standard especially if it is, to them, a foreign cuisine. This applies in basically every country around the world. That being said, I don't think the goal of good food is to be "authentic" if restaurant critiques are any indication.
> And whats up with the size of the meals served in restaurants?
Two things. If you have a (non-fast food) restaurant and want to increase revenue, there aren't too many options. One approach is to increase the size of the meal (eg serve 10% more food but charge 25% more money).
The other is the doggy bag (taking away leftovers with you). You can then reheat that to make another meal.
When I lived in the UK, going to eat at a restaurant was a rare thing (maybe once every few months). On moving to the US I found my colleagues would often eat out three or four times a week, and have leftovers for many of the other meals.
The movies really get you in america. It'll cost you something like $4 for a small and $5.50 for a large (where the large is quite literally 3 times bigger than the small). Of course if you're with an SO you can share the large but when people go alone they just buy the large and plan to drink it the entire day. Same for popcorn. I think you get something like 6-8 times more (because the free refill) when ordering a large compared to small and the cost is less than double.
Obesity is still a big problem and shaves off years of our lives. I think having an anti-obesity agenda is a wonderful thing and shouldn't be trivialized.
One would have hoped Obamacare would have caused an increase in longevity, what with the dramatic decrease in the uninsured. Particularly, the expansion of Medicaid which allowed the poor to gain treatment for chronic conditions like diabetes which they had not had previous access to. But I suppose for that to show up in death statistics would play out over a much longer time scale.
Well, without mentioning an agenda, stress causes heart disease. Obviously if we could do something so that people could stress less, exercise more, and eat fresh food more often rather than processed food, heart disease would drop and people would die less.
The quality of available food in the US is a big part of the problem. A recent TED speaker postulates 74% of food in the average US grocery store is spiked with added sugar [1]. We also eat too few vegetables and too much meat in our diets. And those foods are often raised with harmful pesticides and hormones respectively.
I am a discerning shopper, avoid fast food and still get surprised by food that is not good for me. For instance, I put a tiny amount of unflavored, low-fat half & half in my coffee in the morning. I checked the label today and see that it contains corn syrup. In my head, it was just skim milk and cream. Silly me.
Could you post a link to/picture of said half & half? I have a very hard time believing it's legal to call something with corn syrup in it "half & half" (as opposed to "creamer" or something similar).
Interesting point that we eat too much sugar (which in turn makes us over eat at meals, and thus become obese). It's like a cultural thing though, maybe we can change it slowly somehow...
one interesting note is that life expectancy at 65 years of age did not change, Indicating that the diseases behind the lower life expectancy occur in middle age or younger.
The reasons behind the decrease. [deaths per 100K population]
The heart disease went up from 167 to 168.5
Also'Unintentional Injuries' went up from 40.5 to 43.2.
On the positive side, the contribution of cancer has come down.
Probably just random variance. In particular, that most categories of cause of death increased seems to point at random chance, since they should not correlated strongly. (But this is probably something to watch next year.)
Shouldn't this be exactly the contrary? If you have 10 independent coin flips, the chance of getting 10 heads is < 0.1%, while if they are perfectly correlated, then it simply becomes 50%.
Having 10 independent causes of death going up simultaneously is very unlikely to be caused by random chance. Rather it's an indication of an external phenomenon influencing all causes simultaneously.
"life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, from 78.9 in 2014 to 78.8 in 2015, according to the latest data. The last time U.S. life expectancy at birth declined was in 1993, when it dropped from 75.6 to 75.4"
"Experts cautioned against interpreting too much from a single year of data; the numbers could reverse themselves next year, they said."
I'd be more suspicious of a completely monotonic data set. "For the first time since 1993" sounds dramatic in a headline but it also means it's only a single data point.
Eat healthy, exercise, don't smoke, stay a good weight.. you will do better than average, on average. I think this is all just a trend of our not healthy culture. If over 10 years everyone gains 10 pounds, your life expectancy is not going to do awesome things.
Hard to say but baby boomer obesity is a probably factor. Boomers are reaching end of life ages and their obesity issues are contributing to early mortality. The boomer population is so large that even a small uptick in obesity related mortality will show up in the national average.
I noticed that the "top ten cause" chart doesn't have an "other" column, but it looks like that can be computed from the total rates for top ten causes and the total for all causes. If my math is correct, we went from 191.3 (2014) to 191.1 (2015). So I guess the good news is the death rate from unpopular or unexplained causes went down a little. :|
It's an imperfect proxy for how well a population is doing. But, yes, yours is a question we should peer into to know whether the presumption of longer life = unqualified good.
That said, in this case, it's believed self-kill and opioid overdosing are contributing to this trend and those are not good contributors.
It's another in a long line of examples underscoring massive inequality, but it's about to be made moot by the 100's to 1000's of gigatons of methane (5 GT in the air right now) from just the ESAS going to push global warming into the +4C to +6C range within a decade. Global famines, wars, mass migrations and so on. If a person today doesn't have a completely self-sufficient, off-the-grid refuge in the far north or south, that person is suicidal or a Christian fundamentalist praying for rain.
[+] [-] notadoc|9 years ago|reply
Widespread obesity, poor diet, sedentary lifestyles, the uniquely inefficient health care system, wealth inequality, etc, will likely cause overall expectancy to drop further.
Related and interesting:
> "As of 2010, the average, upper-income 50-year-old man was expected to live to 89. But the same man, if he's lower income, would live to just 76, according to the report."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/18/the-g...
[+] [-] astrodust|9 years ago|reply
Uneducating: The "fake news" problem is the tip of the iceberg. People are celebrating their ignorance as if it's a good thing, that being educated is to lose touch with the real world. It's telling that the flat-earth community, filled with offensive levels of pride in stupidity, thrives in the US.
Unearning: Children are often earning far less than their parents because they're forced into crappy part-time jobs or minimum wage temp work. Those lifetime jobs that parents got in a union or a big enterprise are all but extinct.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|9 years ago|reply
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/25135...
[+] [-] gressquel|9 years ago|reply
Obsese parents together with children as small as 6 years old were all dining at fast-food restaurants eating massive amount of food. The kids were very obese too.
The entire culture seemed for _me_ as its rather normal to eat your dinner at kfc or mcdonalds than making food at home. When we took the flight fra NYC to Vegas we noticed there were more obese people than "regular sized". But when we took fra SF to London it was opposite.
And whats up with the size of the meals served in restaurants? its huuge. alot food for little money. Sometimes we split one dish in between us because it was too much for a single person. The same when we went to movies, we got to choose size of coke and popcorn. So we picked medium coke. Medium is like extra-large in europe.
I think its sad because americans are missing out on really great food. It is the food you cook yourself thats not only healthy but tastes so much better and authentic.
I hope nobody is offended my post but I just felt its an area to improve on.
[+] [-] vinay427|9 years ago|reply
I agree with most of your post as I am fortunate to have been exposed to food cultures outside the US, but I disagree with this point. Many people either can't or won't cook food that is "authentic" to any reasonable standard especially if it is, to them, a foreign cuisine. This applies in basically every country around the world. That being said, I don't think the goal of good food is to be "authentic" if restaurant critiques are any indication.
[+] [-] rogerbinns|9 years ago|reply
Two things. If you have a (non-fast food) restaurant and want to increase revenue, there aren't too many options. One approach is to increase the size of the meal (eg serve 10% more food but charge 25% more money).
The other is the doggy bag (taking away leftovers with you). You can then reheat that to make another meal.
When I lived in the UK, going to eat at a restaurant was a rare thing (maybe once every few months). On moving to the US I found my colleagues would often eat out three or four times a week, and have leftovers for many of the other meals.
[+] [-] wapz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickConclusion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|9 years ago|reply
http://stateofobesity.org/rates/
Obesity is still a big problem and shaves off years of our lives. I think having an anti-obesity agenda is a wonderful thing and shouldn't be trivialized.
[+] [-] thinkcontext|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DefaultUserHN|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draw_down|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] djklanac|9 years ago|reply
I am a discerning shopper, avoid fast food and still get surprised by food that is not good for me. For instance, I put a tiny amount of unflavored, low-fat half & half in my coffee in the morning. I checked the label today and see that it contains corn syrup. In my head, it was just skim milk and cream. Silly me.
[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/11/18/502171330/how-worried-should-w...
[+] [-] 0xffff2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rogerdpack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smaddali|9 years ago|reply
On the positive side, the contribution of cancer has come down.
[+] [-] killedbydeath|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodandsteel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] othello|9 years ago|reply
Having 10 independent causes of death going up simultaneously is very unlikely to be caused by random chance. Rather it's an indication of an external phenomenon influencing all causes simultaneously.
[+] [-] bediger4000|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdulli|9 years ago|reply
"Experts cautioned against interpreting too much from a single year of data; the numbers could reverse themselves next year, they said."
I'd be more suspicious of a completely monotonic data set. "For the first time since 1993" sounds dramatic in a headline but it also means it's only a single data point.
[+] [-] brianwawok|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|9 years ago|reply
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa055643#t=article
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831354/
[+] [-] intev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcl|9 years ago|reply
I noticed that the "top ten cause" chart doesn't have an "other" column, but it looks like that can be computed from the total rates for top ten causes and the total for all causes. If my math is correct, we went from 191.3 (2014) to 191.1 (2015). So I guess the good news is the death rate from unpopular or unexplained causes went down a little. :|
[+] [-] duaneb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|9 years ago|reply
That said, in this case, it's believed self-kill and opioid overdosing are contributing to this trend and those are not good contributors.
[+] [-] dgudkov|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] disposablezero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]