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Americans Less Healthy, But Outlive Brits
An anonymous reader writes with this intriguing snippet: "Older Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, but they live as long or even longer than their English peers, according to a new study by researchers from the RAND Corporation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. Researchers found that while Americans aged 55 to 64 have higher rates of chronic diseases than their peers in England, they died at about the same rate. And Americans age 65 and older — while still sicker than their English peers — had a lower death rate than similar people in England, according to findings published in the journal Demography."
Despite all this clever wording, Americans do not outlive Brits in the vast majority of cases.
USA - Male life expectancy 75.6 years, female 80.8 years.
UK - Male life expectancy 77.2 years, female 81.6 years.
Notice how one set of numbers are larger than the others.
There're many other factors... Such as amount of money spend on health care... For instance the US spends more than twice as much on heath care per citizen as the UK (and the US doesn't even cover all of their citizen).
That's according to OECD: http://tinyurl.com/cr9753
If you want to talk reality, forget beer comparisons, try cheese. America is home to the worlds most disgusting cheese. This is the country that invented spray on cheese. Everytime I talk about American cheese with Americans, they say, 'ah, but we do have good cheeses, you just have to look for them.' And they try to give me some Wisconsin cheddar which admittedly is not awful, just bad. I don't know what it is. The US has contributed some fantastic music, movies, plays, inventions, economic theories, software and people to the world. Really great, great stuff.
But what you call cheese could kill a rhino at ten paces.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Sad where it's gone since then - I blame Prohibition, myself.
Prohibition is the reason that Americans perceive that beer should be served very cold. Back then, people were glad of any beer that they could get, so speakeasys sold really cheap crap produced in someone's back room. Chilling it deadened the taste buds and removed the horrible yeasty taste. By the time it got back to room temperature, it was completely undrinkable.
In contrast, a decent ale is still very nice at that temperature. There are some really good beers in the USA (I particularly like some of the amber ales, which are very hard to get on this side of the pond), but massive advertising by the crap beer companies have reinforced the notion that beer should be served at a temperature that prevents you from tasting it, so they're hard to find.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you want to talk reality, forget beer comparisons, try cheese.
Disclaimer. I was born and raise in Wisconsin. In fact I still live here. I went to London for a year for school and married a French women. I've spent lot of time in France, a country that prides itself in cheese. In the US, Wisconsin prides itself for it's dairy products, including cheese.
America is home to the worlds most disgusting cheese.
I wouldn't go that far. It's certainly not as good as Europe, but there are reasons for the lack of variety and therefor flavor in cheese.
And they try to give me some Wisconsin cheddar which admittedly is not awful
That's because it's not awful, it's good. The problem is that cheddar simply is a bland cheese. Of course, you do have to find the good stuff. What cheese lover really gets existed over *chedder*?! lol It can go great on burgers (I still prefer swiss) but it's simply a dull cheese and that's not Wisconsin's fault. It's just as bad in Chedder England.
I don't know what it is.
It has to do with milk pasteurization laws. It prevents a lot of cheeses from being made. Lots of them goat cheese. That's why goat cheese in the US is always the same terrible crappy stuff and why you never see the variety of cheese you have in Europe. It has really grown to be a cultural thing.
But likewise, these same laws are the reason you don't see boxes of milk on store shelves, outside of refrigeration units. I was confused the first time I was in France at my wife's house and I had some cereal for breakfast. She had me pull a box of milk from the pantry. I thought all milk had to be kept refrigerated. Then we talked with the shop owner of Nalaa's cheese in Green Bay. He explained the pasteurization laws and why we can't get the good variety of cheese here and how he was limited on what he could import and sell.
American's who haven't spent much time outside of the US simply don't get exposed to what's out there. And those that do, might not be brave enough to ever try it because some of that cheese simply smells like a rotten skunk carcass in the Texas heat, but tastes like the heavens. But many people won't get past that smell. Case in point, we've turned many of my friends onto Rachlette cheese. That's not as pungent as some goat cheeses, but some had some real reservations of ever trying it. It smells up the kitchen when cutting it (who cut the cheese? There's a reason for that phrase).
Of course, one of the biggest complements at my recent wedding (in France) was the fact that we had a cheese buffet. A table with over 30 types of cheeses on it. You've never seen American's so confused and pleased. I shocked one of my friends to go and eat every kind of cheese he could find.
It really is a cheese repression.
Now, beer. Microbrews have really come a long way to pass by the basic Miller and Bud products we have. You can find some pretty good tasting beer in Wisconsin. New Glarus, Leienenkugels, Capital Brew, etc. are good beer. It's also much more expensive and in a place like Wisconsin where quantity can seem more important than quality, you'll find people still turn to Miller or Bud Light. And when you're use to drinking bland for so long, having something with flavor becomes too much of a shock.
I think the UK has a better quality average, but the US also suffers from gimmicks. There's a billion beer makers with a billion private label beers each trying to sound like their beer is something new or different. This one has LIME! This one has LEMON! This one is called "Fat Squirrel", this is "Moose Drool", oh, look, a Monty Python branded beer! Here's a Pumpkin beer!
*sigh*
It's complicated.
Point is, Wisconsin doesn't have crap for cheese. What they do make is good, but what they do make really isn't good cheese to begin with. You can thank US laws and now US culture as it
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
Actually, it's more of the dangers of the lifestyle in general. More people are killed from more reckless behavior in the US then in the UK. We do more stupid shit on a regular basis like give some types of guns to anyone over 18 based on nothing more then their desire to have them. We allow juveniles to handle loaded firearms and other weapons (Bow and Arrows) unsupervised for extended lengths of time (while hunting) and so on. We have one of the largest recreational boating populations in the western world, some of the largest lands allotted to motorcycle, quad-atv, and other recreational uses.
But probably the number one risk that would alter the life expectancy quite a bit would be cars. In the US, there is/was about 2.28 cars per household (in 2008) while only about 1.1 cars per household in the UK (at about the time- from 2008 to 2009). This means that more people are driving in the US then in the UK. Gas is also cheaper which generally means that more people are driving for recreational uses verses more restrictive usage like necessities and so on. But something that probably would make this skewed even more would be that in the UK, you typically have to be 17 to get a drivers license and even then, you are restricted to what types of cars you can drive until your 18 or 21. In the US, it differs from state to state, but in most cases, you can start driving at 16 years of age, there is no limits on the types of cars (or non-commercial trucks) and in some areas, with certain hardships you can get a drivers license at age 14 (Ohio is one).
A reflection of this is strongly shown in the UK traffic death statistics in which they listed that in 2006, there were 5.4 road accident deaths per 100,000 population in the UK compared to 14.3 per 100,000 populations in the US. I don't car where you are, if you have almost three times as many people dieing from more or less random occurrences, the life expectancy will be lower and it won't be much on the grounds of health care provided Health care provided is equal in traffic fatalities because it's all either not in the equation (dead on the scene) or life threatening injuries in which not only does car insurance cover, it's illegal in the US for a hospital open to the public to refuse or limit emergency medical treatment based around the ability to pay.