Bloated, blue-collar Americans -- gorged on diets of fries and burgers, but denied their share of US riches -- are bringing the nation's steady rise in life expectancy to a grinding halt.
Twenty years ago, the US, the richest nation on the planet, led the world's longevity league. Today, American women rank only 19th, while males can manage only 28th place, alongside men from Brunei.
These startling figures are blamed by researchers on two key factors: obesity, and inequality of health care. A man born in a poor area of Washington can have a life expectancy that is 40 years less than a woman in a prosperous neighborhood only a few blocks away, for example.
"A look at the Americans' health reveals astonishing inequalities in our society," stated Professor Lawrence Jacobs of Minnesota University and Professor James Morone, of Brown University, Rhode Island, in the journal American Prospect.
Their paper is one of a recent swathe of studies that have uncovered a shocking truth: America, once the home of the world's best-fed, longest-lived people, is now a divided nation made up of a rich elite and a large underclass of poor, ill-fed, often obese, men and women who are dying early.
In another newly published paper, statisticians at Boston College reveal that in France, Japan and Switzerland, men and women aged 65 now live several years longer than they do in the US. Indeed, America only just scrapes above Mexico and most Eastern European nations.
This decline is astonishing given America's wealth. Not only is it Earth's richest nation, it devotes more of its GDP -- 13 per cent -- to health care than any other developed nation.
Switzerland comes next with 10 percent; Britain spends 7 percent. As the Boston group -- Alicia Munnell, Robert Hatch and James Lee -- point out, "the richer a country is, the more resources it can dedicate to education, medical and other goods and services associated with great longevity."
The result in every other developed country has been an unbroken rise in life expectancy since 1960.
But this formula no longer applies to America, where life expectancy's rise has slowed but not yet stopped, because resources are now so unevenly distributed. When the Boston College group compared men and women in America's top 10 percent wage bracket with those in the bottom 10 percent, they found the former group earned 17 times more than the latter. In Japan, Switzerland and Norway, this ratio is only five-to-one.
"Check-ups, screenings and vaccinations save lives, improve well-being, and are shockingly uneven (in America)," Jacobs and Morone state.
"Well-insured people get assigned hospital beds; the uninsured get patched up and sent back to the streets. For poor Americans, health service provision is little better than that in third world nations. People die younger in Harlem than in Bangladesh," Jacobs' and Morone's report stated.
Consumption of alcohol, tobacco and food can also have a huge impact on life expectancy. The first two factors are not involved with America's longevity crisis. Smoking and drinking are modest compared with Europe. Food consumption is a different matter, however, for the US has experienced an explosion in obesity rates in the past 20 years. As a result, 34 percent of all women in the US are obese compared with 4 percent in Japan. For men, the figures are 28 and 2 percent respectively.
"US obesity rates jumped in the 1980s and 1990s, and the vast majority of the population affected by obesity had not yet reached age 65 by 2000," the Boston group stated.
"As the large baby boom cohort begins to turn 65 in coming years, a stronger connection between obesity rates and life expectancy may emerge."
In other words, as the nation's middle-aged fatties reach retirement age, more and more will start to die out. Life expectancy in the US could then actually go into decline.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
RSS