U.S. Life Expectancy Increases (as usual)
From the Associated Press, via Yahoo News: US life expectancy surpasses 78, a new record.
This is in spite of the fact that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 34% of Americans are classified as overweight and an additional 34% are classified as obese. And it's a horrible, scary, deadly EPIDEMIC - an epidemic that is now affecting 68% of us. Why are we not dying earlier? Where, I ask, are the piles of dead fat people?
Despite decades of hand wringing over how increasing rates of overweight and obesity are going to decrease life expectancy in the U.S., life expectancy keeps stubbornly increasing.
Is it because fat people are benefitting from advances in medicine? If we are, it's being mitigated by a lot a societal forces that would tend to damage our health.
Fat Americans are charged more for or refused health insurance. Medical professionals tend to want to treat our body size rather than caring for our health. We are more likely than average to be poor and/or members of ethnic minorities that are discriminated against. We, as fat people, are discriminated against. Large numbers of us continue to subject ourselves to unhealthy and ineffective weight loss methods. Given this, it's a miracle that as a group, we aren't causing the national life expectancy to decrease.
Aren't we fat people wonderfully resilient?
Oh! And the same thing is happening in the U.K.