Not to sound mean, but the pitiful life expectancy in the US is as plain as day. Walk around and just look at the physiques of most citizens! Guts and butts protruding everywhere. I’ve lived in Taipei and travel to Europe frequently and the first thing that hits you upon return stateside is how fat everyone is. Death by diet and lethargy. The car culture…driving from driveway to parking lots repeatedly doesn’t help either.
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The United States is doing much worse than its peer countries. On top of the long-term, widening gap, other countries’ prior upward trajectory didn’t crash as hard during the COVID epidemic and they bounced back afterward, while the US continues to fall.
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Its not good news at all.
Personally, I’m feeling rather upset specifically that the UK (land of bangers and mash, and all things boiled), is doing better than the US. This is a travesty! I know the average diet in the US is bad, but I find it hard to believe that the UK is better given the food they serve! 
being beaten by Sweden is ok, thats land of the cross-country skiing families, OK - I understand they are healthier than the US. But England?
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Strange that the colder states have longer lifespans? Coincidence?
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As someone noted in the Twitter thread, it’s notable how much Michigan, Maine, and South Florida buck the trend.
California (with 1/10 of the entire US population), southern Texas, and South Florida are clear exceptions.
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My guess is that it’s education and diet, not weather.
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You are probably spot on here.
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Yes, mostly diet.
But a new study just came out suggesting cold temperature is not a bad thing when it comes to longevity - so keep doing those cold plunges and polar bear swims! :
Cold temperature extends longevity and prevents disease-related protein aggregation through PA28γ-induced proteasomes
Aging is a primary risk factor for neurodegenerative disorders that involve protein aggregation. Because lowering body temperature is one of the most effective mechanisms to extend longevity in both poikilotherms and homeotherms, a better understanding of cold-induced changes can lead to converging modifiers of pathological protein aggregation. Here, we find that cold temperature (15 °C) selectively induces the trypsin-like activity of the proteasome in Caenorhabditis elegans through PSME-3, the worm orthologue of human PA28γ/PSME3. This proteasome activator is required for cold-induced longevity and ameliorates age-related deficits in protein degradation. Moreover, cold-induced PA28γ/PSME-3 diminishes protein aggregation in C. elegans models of age-related diseases such as Huntington’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Notably, exposure of human cells to moderate cold temperature (36 °C) also activates trypsin-like activity through PA28γ/PSME3, reducing disease-related protein aggregation and neurodegeneration. Together, our findings reveal a beneficial role of cold temperature that crosses evolutionary boundaries with potential implications for multi-disease prevention.
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Bit of a misconception over what we eat here (John Hemming and his full English to one side!)
Also, we don’t walk around carrying guns - possibly causes quite a big difference.
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In the 1950s, U.S. life expectancy ranked 12th highest in the world.
By 1968, the U.S. had fallen to 29th.
Today we are ranked 51, behind Cuba, Chile, Costa Rica, Lebanon, Thailand, and many others.
The study, published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health, also shows more than 50 countries have surpassed the U.S. in life expectancy since the 1930s, and a handful of states may be partly responsible.
“The scale of the problem is bigger than we ever thought … older than we thought, (and) the number of countries outperforming the United States is much larger than we thought,” said study author Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and health at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
But the general takeaway remains the same, said Michal Engelman, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The timeline shows how life expectancy may be heavily influenced by systemic factors that are larger than individual health choices.
Full study paper:
Falling Behind: The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy Between the United States and Other Countries, 1933–2021
Conclusions. The US life expectancy disadvantage began in the 1950s and has steadily worsened over the past 4 decades. Dozens of globally diverse countries have outperformed the United States. Causal factors appear to have been concentrated in the Midwest and South.
Paywalled journal article:
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307310
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" A ‘blueprint’ for longevity: New study has an answer for why some people live to be over 100"
Same author;
Published: April 3, 2023 updated April 4, 2023
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I know that “internally” lowering body temp (eg via fasting, CR or lowering of inflammation , etc) is correlated with longevity in different studies.
And there is all the cold plunge, cryo therapy stuff.
Wonder if small deltas in long term environmental temp (eg what temp AC/heater is set at, the new cooling beds) can have direct longevity benefits (besides via potentially better sleep)?
Any thoughts?
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I’ve not seen any data on this issue, so don’t have an opinion. Not sure it would be worth it though… I tried CR for about 6 months and was always cold, wearing a sweater in summer in California… not a life I would find enjoyable longer term. Though - that said, there are situations where I do find lower temp beneficial - like in bed. I’m a warm sleeper - so the bed-cooling technology is of interest to me, and I have enjoyed the Chilipad (though its louder than I would like) and Ooler type products. So that might be a way to benefit, and enjoy it, if it is actually beneficial; https://sleep.me/product/ooler-sleep-system
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This new company is focused on a drug that lowers your body temperature for longevity effects… Biophysical Therapeutics: A New Longevity Biotech Platform Company Plays it cool with a Pipeline of Experimentally-validated New Drugs
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It’s true! Though I’ve heard this said by a few different scientists now that what you eat has a much smaller effect than how much you eat. As many vitamins and nutrients vegetables might have, the best thing about them might be that it’s really hard to run a caloric surplus just eating vegetables.
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This chart looks at life expectancy after the age of 60. The USA comes in 37th place which is a much better number than life expectancy at birth. I find this chart to be more useful as it removes all of the deaths that occur under the age of 60 (most suicides, overdoses, homicides, etc…)
Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Australia are the place to be for longevity!
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I’d say it then puts US life expectancy at the mercy of lack of exercise and a horrible diet.
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