Life expectancy in the United States is reportedly lagging behind all other English-speaking countries in the world as things like obesity and unhealthy habits continue to cut lives short.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, obesity has been a growing problem in the United States, with experts expecting more than half the country’s population to be obese by 2035.
The number of people considered to be clinically obese has reached over 1 billion worldwide. According to data from the CDC, 1 in 5 American adults was obese in 2022. Obesity is a particular problem in Texas, where the condition has made significant gains over the past few years, with 35.5% of adults and 17% of children between the ages of 10 and 17 estimated to be obese.
Smoking among American adults has decreased significantly over the last couple of decades, but the advent of popular e-cigarettes and vaping has ushered in a new generation of nicotine-addicted young people, handicapping them with increased risk of heart attack or stroke.
Here’s some of what Newsweek reported on the nation’s low life expectancy ranking:
America has the lowest life expectancy of all English-speaking countries, new research has found. However, this varies significantly across the nation, with some states seeing much lower life expectancies than others.
“It’s well-known that American life expectancy performs very poorly compared to other high-income countries,” Jessica Ho, associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State and senior author on the new paper, told Newsweek via email. “[However,] even compared to this subset of countries with shared characteristics, the U.S. has very low life expectancy, which is quite alarming.”
In their study, published in the peer-reviewed journal BMJ Open earlier this month, Ho and colleagues compared life expectancy data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) and World Health Organization (WHO) Mortality Database between 1990 and 2018 for the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.