How America Is Losing the Longevity Race

'The Grit' is a TakePart series that presents global news, pulverized. The author is a British journalist who has been writing about world events for more than a decade, and still thinks there is a future for the human race.

How old do you plan to be when you shuffle off this mortal coil, breathe your last, cash in your chips, buy the farm, finally log out, or otherwise quietly leave the frame? 80? 90? 100? If it’s anywhere near the latter, you may want to try moving to Japan.

We know people in Britain, Japan, Australia, and Canada live longer than Americans. What we didn't know is that America isn't catching up. According to a new joint U.K./U.S. study, it's falling behind.

American men can expect to live to 75. American women should get to 80. In Japan, where life expectancy is the best in the world, men make 79, women 86. Worryingly for Americans, those relative gaps are growing.

Why? The answer is poverty, wealth, and ambition. Yes, wealth. We'll get to that.

Let's deal with poverty first. If you are poor in America, you are far more likely to die young than poor people in comparable nations. Our British/American researchers contend this has nothing to do with population size, racial diversity, or economics, and everything to do with inequality.

Life is so grim for some communities in the Deep South, Appalachia, and parts of northern Texas, that average life expectancy for a man is around 67. If you reside in a really poor household, smoking, obesity, and high-fat, high-salt junk food diets quickly set you on the wrong path. The country’s negligible healthcare finishes you off.

The American medical system is no friend of people without money, and any country that makes it more rewarding to be a cosmetic surgeon than a community doctor is tossing a large part of its population to the dogs.

But is this the only reason why America comes 38th in the world life expectancy rankings? Them pesky poor people distorting the average?

Partly. But there's another killer out there...

This one creeps up on the non-smokers who cut down on the alcohol, take regular exercise, and munch hungrily on those delicious tofu sandwiches. This killer goes for motivated, switched-on people like you.

Ambition.

To create a society that massively over-rewards its winners, you need a high proportion of losers. A lot of these “losers” will be the sort of people who bust their guts to land a good job, strive to achieve the status they see their contemporaries achieving, and...don't quite make it to billionaire's row.

Healthy pressure is a good thing; unhealthy pressure causes stress, and stress kills.

Setting your sights on putting a Ferrari on the drive and sacrificing everything to achieve it isn't healthy. Pushing your employees to the limit in search of the next big deal isn't healthy. And corporate America requires its minions to stress in spades.


If you already take care of your physical health, the best thing you can do right now is accept you're not going to be the next President of the United States or a multimillionaire captain of industry, and act accordingly. Chill out.

So that's what poverty and ambition are doing for America's life expectancy—what about wealth? How on earth can unlimited funds be unhelpful?

As every rich American knows, the best medical facilities on the planet are just a phone call away. And that, apparently, is the problem.

According to one academic, even for the rich, the American medical system has no interest in longevity for its own sake, as living long and well is not profitable.

“Doctors are not necessarily mainly interested in [peoples’] health but work for organisations that have to make an income...You make more money out of a patient who spends more on many drugs and investigatory operations than one who lives longer with less intervention.”

In other words, the health industry in America exists to flog as many drugs and medical procedures as it can. It might lose the patient, but another will be along any minute.

It’s a bleak assessment, because the problem cuts across every social strata. The unequal society, with its winner- takes-all culture, makes America what it is. It’s also the cancer which is (prematurely) killing the patient.

Read more: