Americans have come last in an analysis of the life expectancy of people living in English-speaking countries.
Citizens of Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand have all lived longer on average since the early 1990s, according to research led by a team of social scientists at Pennsylvania State University.
Americans had the shortest life expectancy at birth, with men living to an average age of 76.5 years in 2019 and women living an average of nearly 81.5 years.
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In Australia, which had the best life expectancy, women lived nearly four more years and men five more years than in America.
But it does depend on where you live in the U.S. The report says people living in California and Hawaii had much higher life expectancy, with women on average living to 83 to 83.9 years and men from 77.5 to 78.4 years.
In America’s Southeast, those stats plunge to 72.6 to 79.9 years on average for women and 69.3 to 74.4 for men.
“One lesson we Americans can learn about life expectancy from looking at comparable countries is where the frontier of best performance lies,” said Jessica Ho, associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State and senior author on the paper.
“Yes, we’re doing badly, but this study shows what can we aim for. We know these gains in life expectancy are actually achievable because other large countries have already done it.”
The researchers used data from the Human Mortality Database and the World Health Organization Mortality Database from between 1990 and 2019.
“One of the main drivers of why American longevity is so much shorter than in other high-income countries is our younger people die at higher rates from largely preventable causes of death, like drug overdose, car accidents and homicide,” Ho explained.
She said that some of the biggest causes in mid-life mortality—between 45 and 64—include drugs and alcohol and higher rates of deaths from cardiovascular disease.
“Some of the latter could be related to sedentary lifestyle, high rates of obesity, unhealthy diet, stress and a history of smoking,” Ho told the Penn State website. “It’s likely that these patterns of unhealthy behaviors put Americans at a disadvantage in terms of their health and vitality.
“What the study shows is that a peer country like Australia far outperforms the U.S. and was able to get its young adult mortality under control. It has really low levels of gun deaths and homicides, lower levels of drug and alcohol use and better performance on chronic diseases, the latter of which points to lifestyle factors, health behaviors and health care performance,” she added.
