PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP via Getty Images may contribute to Americans shorter lifespan.

A lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables in the U.S. 'In every one of those five buckets, we found problems that distinguish the United States from other countries.'Ī fruit seller at Dom Pedro market in Coimbra, central Portugal. The panel looked at American life and death in terms of the public health and medical care system, individual behaviors like diet and tobacco use, social factors like poverty and inequality, the physical environment, and public policies and values. 'We were very systematic and thorough about how we thought about this,' says Woolf. The researchers were charged with documenting how Americans have more diseases and die younger and to explore the reasons why.

'We were trying to just say – look, this is an American problem.' Digging into the 'why' population does worse than the top proportion of other populations,' she explains. 'That was a decision – not to emphasize the differences in our population, because there is data that actually shows that even the top proportion of the U.S. That's why, says Eileen Crimmins, professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California who was also on the panel that produced the report, they made a deliberate choice to focus on the health of the U.S. After looking across different age and racial and economic and geographic groups, he says, 'what we found was that this problem existed in almost every category we looked at.' had a shorter life expectancy than people in other countries,' says Woolf, who chaired the committee that produced the report. 'We went into this with an open mind as to why it is that the U.S. health disadvantage' – the fact that living in America is worse for your health and makes you more likely to die younger than if you lived in another rich country like the U.K., Switzerland or Japan. The researchers catalog what they call the 'U.S. It goes on: 'Even Americans with healthy behaviors, for example, those who are not obese or do not smoke, appear to have higher disease rates than their peers in other countries.' 'American children are less likely to live to age 5 than children in other high-income countries,' the authors write on the second page. But the picture painted in the 'Shorter Lives' report could shock even those who feel like they know the story. It can seem easy to brush that off as another scold about eating more vegetables and getting more exercise. Beyond bad habitsĪmericans are used to hearing about how their poor diets and sedentary lifestyles make their health bad. Ten years later, here's a look back at what that eye-popping study found, and why the researchers involved believe it's not too late to turn the trends around. American life expectancy is lower than that of Cuba, Lebanon, and Czechia. In the years since, the trends have worsened. The authors tried to sound an alarm, but found few in the public or government or private sectors were willing to listen. was stalling on health advances in the population while other countries raced ahead. The results showed – convincingly – that the U.S. health and death with other developed countries. One group of people are not surprised at all: Woolf and the other researchers involved in a landmark, 400-page study ten years ago with a name that says it all: 'Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.' The research by a panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences and funded by the National Institutes of Health compared U.S. How could this happen? In a country that prides itself on scientific excellence and innovation, and spends an incredible amount of money on health care, the population keeps dying at younger and younger ages. 'Now, it's increasing at a magnitude that has not occurred at least for half a century.'Īcross the lifespan, and across every demographic group, Americans die at younger ages than their counterparts in other wealthy nations. 'This is the first time in my career that I've ever seen – it's always been declining in the United States for as long as I can remember,' says the JAMA paper's lead author Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. Also, a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found rising mortality rates among U.S. Then, last week, more bad news: Maternal mortality in the U.S. While countries all over the world saw life expectancy rebound during the second year of the pandemic after the arrival of vaccines, the U.S. Just before Christmas, federal health officials confirmed life expectancy in America had dropped for a nearly unprecedented second year in a row – down to 76 years.

Life expectancy in us