7 ms·

U.S. Women Are Dying Younger Than Their Mothers, and No One Knows Why

47 points by aelaguiz 13y ago

hacknat 13y ago
Because they're more obese.
- elwell 13y ago
  Yeah, overlay that map with this one: http://www.stratasan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Obese_population_by_county.png http://www.stratasan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Obese_po...
  - Mikeb85 13y ago
    It's troubling that the color scale starts at 13.7%...
  - colanderman 13y ago
    The correlation seems to break down in Appalachia -- low obesity; high mortality rate. (Aside -- the stark contrast in obesity between Colorado and Kansas is surprising.)
    - Patrick_Devine 13y ago
      I'd love to have access to the raw data to feed it into R. I'm fairly positive even with Appalachia included there is still going to be a strong positive correlation.
      - gohrt 13y ago
        That's not really how averages work, though. You can't just smash two modes of a bimodal distribution together and treat it like a unimodal distribution. I mean, you can, but it generates garbage results.
        Patrick_Devine 13y ago
        It's hard to draw that conclusion without knowing what's in either data set. I'm fairly certain that the obesity data would have gender as one of its attributes, and it's also probable that any death statistics would include other vital stats such as height and weight at time of death. But you're right, it's certainly possible that all of the women in those states are of normal weight and it's only the men who are obese. I'm being a little glib though, it's hard to know without seeing the data.
    - 3pt14159 13y ago
      That doesn't prove anything. We are looking at the delta here. It could very easily be that the correlation breaks down in Appalachia because Appalachia has doubled its very low obesity rate to just a low obesity rate.
    - VLM 13y ago
      Something involving certain forms of resource extraction. I was working on a theory of grain related herbicides pesticides but I know for a fact coal mining via mtn top removal makes quite an ecological mess. Another not entirely far fetched idea I'm working on is livestock contamination of drinking water resulting in high constant antibiotic levels leading to more resistant infections in general. Looking at where I know there are poultry plants and dairy farms its not looking good. Its entirely possible coal tailing contamination of water kills em in Appalachia, factory livestock contamination of drinking water gets em in some rural areas, and pesticide / herbicide contamination of drinking water gets em in some areas. In that case we should in theory be able to track increased death rate by river water flow directions. For whatever reason "some contaminants" are apparently not in the Colorado river basin, but the Mississippi isn't looking good.
mynewwork 13y ago
Title: "No one knows why" Article: "female obesity and drug abuse have risen dramatically over the past two decades"
- colmvp 13y ago
  Well it's also important to note that they mention female high school dropouts, specifically to measure their access to health care and income opportunities, as well as health behaviors like smoking and obesity.
- bdcravens 13y ago
  1 in 4 women die of heart disease. 1 in 36 die of breast cancer. Which one receives more attention?
  - seszett 13y ago
    Well... boobies! Heart disease just can't compete, even though it would benefit a lot more people, simply because it also affects men.
  - VLM 13y ago
    You need years of life lost stats not just lifetime frequency. My grandmother's heart didn't get her until she was in her 80s. If she had a miracle perfect heart well maybe she would have made a couple more years at most till the kidneys, or the liver, or something else got her. Unfortunately I know of too many women, practically girls really, who get cancer in their 20s or maybe 30s. Without the cancer they'd probably have had another 50 healthy years before the heart disease got em. Edited to add you hear a lot about people dying of heart disease when they're 30 because its shockingly unusual, usually heart problems kill bluehairs. But cancer always seems to strike someone like my kids friends mom who's only 30something, that unfortunately seems normal for cancer?
    - bdcravens 13y ago
      Good points. Though I'm thinking the 80 year old dying of heart disease is less common than the 30 year old obese person who is buying death on installment plan
croisciutto 13y ago
Perhaps dying younger is simply that being educated and joining the workforce entails thinking more. Low grade, high-volume thinking requires persistent states of arousal, not dissimilar from stress, and ultimately causing stress. The symptoms are reduced immune activity, increased blood pressure, poor digestion, etc. The health risks of chronic overwork (heart attack, stroke) do seem to be the same as those of excess hedonism (heart attack, stroke). The double whammy is that people who work too hard tend to 'play hard' during their off-duty hours. They think of it as necessary and well-earned relaxation, which is why they do it, but it isn't quite the same thing. Drinking, smoking and other drugs merely produce more arousal, though it is interpreted as being pleasant because the ego is not threatened. I think the foregoing ideas are why some religious traditions have specified a day of complete rest, which breaks the cycle somewhat
ck2 13y ago
Is it just me or are areas of the map that show "improvements" where you would more likely find immigration? Just a very casual observation, may be completely wrong.
- bilbo0s 13y ago
  Hm... You may be right. That's actually pretty depressing... it means there may be no improvement... just a general worsening being masked by female immigrants. I wonder if female immigrants were excluded from the populations used in these two studies?
- VLM 13y ago
  Looks closer to percent urbanization. Migrant farm worker land not looking very blue. My pasty white state matches pretty well with urbanization, not so well with racial variation. This explanation doesn't seem to hold in other areas. I wonder how well it corresponds to grain related pesticide and insecticide use per county. This seems to work, Los Vegas is not exactly a legendary wheatfield. CA has a lot of agribusiness but not as much grain as Iowa or Montana. Ahh the waving cornfields of Manhattan Island NYC. It seems to match up...
  - ck2 13y ago
    Agriculture is far from the only immigration job. Everything from construction to tech.
DanBC 13y ago
Why people say "obese" they either mean the everyday use of the word "really fat", or they mean (as here) the formal definition of "BMI > 30". There are problems with BMI - we hear about the trained athlete with high muscle mass and very little body fat who has a BMI of 38. Luckily most people are nothing like that trained athlete so BMI is handy for this kind of mass population stuff. As Mikeb85 says, the map posted by elwell starts at 13.7%, and that lowest band goes up to nearly a quarter of the population at 23.3%! NHBLI have a nice chart here. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/obesity/bmi_tbl.htm http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/obesity/bmi_tbl.htm The average American man is 69 inches tall. He'd have to be 203 pounds to have a BMI of 30. The average American woman is 64 inches. She'd weigh 174 pounds. Fat shaming is bad, and stupid, and shouldn't be tolerated. But there is a problem with people's shifting perceptions of what "fat" and "obese" mean. People who would have been called fat are now called "shapely" or "curvy". People do not recognise obesity any more.
- huttbutt 13y ago
  >fat shaming is bad, and stupid No, it's not. Obesity is unhealthy and usually the result of bad habits. All the ex-fatties I know think this "fat acceptance" crusade is bad and stupid.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > >fat shaming is bad, and stupid > No, it's not. Yes it is. > Obesity is unhealthy and usually the result of bad habits. Shaming isn't therapy for bad habits, and "usually" wouldn't justify it even if it was. > All the ex-fatties I know think this "fat acceptance" crusade is bad and stupid. And...so what?
  - VLM 13y ago
    "Obesity is ... usually the result of bad habits." wrong, usually poor education / bad for profit dietary advice. Wanna sit around all day and eat while watching TV? Sure go ahead here's a bottomless bag of celery to eat. Or carrots. Or lettuce. Good luck getting fat on that. But if the .com and .gov make a lot of money promoting corn chips, it doesn't matter that corn is terrible for mammals other than fattening up livestock on the farm, there's money to be made, pork those babes up with corn chips. Ditto 2 liters of corn syrup soda, bowls of ice cream, anything with refined sugar added. Get back to me when a disgusting display of gluttony involving grilled chicken ceasars salad results in obesity. On the other hand if its something that farmers slop their hogs with to fatten them up, like, say, corn products, well, guess what happens if you slop the chicks with corn products?
SmokyBourbon 13y ago
Divorce and having fewer children. If there are fewer people around to watch out for you or take care if you, chances are you won't live as long.
tekalon 13y ago
I read somewhere (long ago and I can't remember where) that the rate of heart disease increased in women the same time more women worked outside their homes. Add that to obesity, education and all the other options the article and commenters have mentioned. Issues like this isn't often one or two things, its many that build up.
smokey42 13y ago
As some suggested a correlation with obesity, I'd like to highlight another correlation. Recent findings showed that obesity can be an side-effect of stress. [There is a genetic component to it, such that people who can compensate detrimental effects of stress to the brain, become obese as a side-effect. People who can't, don't become obese but have detrimental effects to their brain. They're fucked both ways. :-( But this is merely a second hand recitation of what I heard a scientist say. Grain of salt, blah blah.] Nevertheless, the biggest source of stress is socio-economic stress. It's way more stressful than any "direct" stress. Trying to find some of the relevant resources: * http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db50.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db50.htm shows correlation between socio-economic status and obesity * http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831158/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831158/ Linkage between obesity and some dopamine pathways are also known since 2001. My own speculation: The location where mortality of women is highest produce the highest socio-economic stress to women. Additional speculation: This ought to happen in high or in low income areas and may be linked with income inequality within the community.
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
Yes we know. Ladies now smoke as much as men do. In my country young women smoke now more than men. You don't smoke to be a man anymore(stupid male reason), now you smoke for getting slim, or looking "sophisticated" or any other stupid female reason. Females now work as hard as men. In the past they had to raise the family only, now they raise the family and work with all the crap of working(stress), they eat the same fast food shit that males do(obesity), they sleep as bad as men do. Females now use hormones for not getting pregnant, breast and ovary's cancer incidence has gone up.(they survive more years through).
- taejo 13y ago
  > Females now use hormones for not getting pregnant, breast and ovary's cancer incidence has gone up. It seems that hormonal birth control slightly elevates the risk of breast cancer, but reduces the risk of ovarian cancer by a larger percentage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormonal_contraception#Effects_on_rates_of_cancers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormonal_contraception#Effects...).
deleted 13y ago
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flexie 13y ago
Obesity and lack of activity. It's easy to see for us outsiders that are used to other sizes. Where I am in Europe, a typical woman has a body not that far from the fashion world's ideals which Americans often call skinny bitches, "anorectic" or similar derogatory terms. Look at pictures of Americans 40 years ago. Most were slender. Now, many if not most could use different eating habits.
- atlanticus 13y ago
  Apparently you are not in northern Europe.
  - flexie 13y ago
    No, but used to be. There we have the same obesity problems, though still on a smaller scale.
001sky 13y ago
This is a flaw in their statistics. Just eyeball the map, and you can see the red counties are in areas of remote/economic depravation. Over the course of 100 years, you are getting "the thin end of the gene pool" as others move out. So, your baseline samples are not the same. Also the gene-pool will be more startified by education as time goes on (ie, its more "common" to have edu degrees), so as the weaker become educated again only the weakest do not. So their is instability in the relationship between the proxy variables for "class" and success and the genetic ones. This article is a good example why researchers (and reporters) need to be boots on the ground and understand what they are dealing with. None of this would be surprising to anyone who hase been to many of the remote rural areas flagged in red here.
drakaal 13y ago
No one knows why.... Obesity is up. As we move away from a labor economy fewer people work on farms and factory, we eat the same number of calories, or more, and do less. More women are in the work place, and that's stressful... Job related stress shortens lives. Sure in the old nuclear family where mom stayed home and raised the kids that was stressful too, but with nannies and day care we still have people in that role, and now you have more single moms doing work and home on their own. Ethnic diversity due to an increase in the number of immigrants from developing nations. We have a lot more people from countries that had much shorter life spans than the US. Enough to move the numbers. Like it or not while Asia has people who live the longest the average is much shorter than those from Europe, and Mexico and Central America are much shorter still.
- VLM 13y ago
  There's a chronological problem with your theoretically logical idea where the farm worker collapse started near the turn of the last century (1900) and smoothly over the decades pretty much anyone who was leaving the farm had left by 1970 but fatness indicators like number of diagnosed diabetes patients didn't start expanding (sorry for pun) until late 1990s (about 20 years after an explosion in corn syrup consumption in the USA, surely just a coincidence). So there is a 90 to 20 year gap depending how you want to run the numbers to explain, why the workers are already gone but not sick yet. There's also a numerical hole where at peak we're talking about 10 million or so american farm workers leaving the farm over the 1900s, but 1/3 or so of 400 million aka over 100 million getting fat. If 10 million changed jobs and 10 million got fat, even if we don't have data to prove its the same 10 mil my spidey sense would tingle, but you're off by a factor of ten. Also the point of the article graph is rural Montana is not the place to be if you're a woman aspiring to be old, but rural Montana never had quite the same industrial production as NYC or the WWII aircraft plants in WA. So thats a geographic issue. The problem with your theory about short lived Mexicans is my general lifetime knowledge about where you'll find illegals living maps pretty decently with where people are actually living longer. Its as though immigrants were not exposed to certain industrial or agricultural toxins in the 3rd world that we expose our own kids to. For example no one in New Mexico (well, there's an accurate name) can speak English anymore, but the article map show's they're ridiculously healthy compared to, say, pasty white rural northern Wisconsin where I'm pretty sure they have a hunting season for illegals. Which is interesting. (edited to add, I liked your post a lot, because it used logical thinking to come up with apparently reasonable falsifiable hypothesis, which is awesome, keep on doing it. Problems need theoreticians and experimentalists to solve them, just one isn't going to do it alone. Theoreticians do need thick skin since 90% of their theories aren't going to work and its nothing personal)
pg 13y ago
That map looks remarkably like this one: http://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/data/facts.html http://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/data/facts.html
- deleted 13y ago
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- 8_hours_ago 13y ago
  And kind of like this map! http://www.startribune.com/177786361.html http://www.startribune.com/177786361.html There's a government conspiracy to kill Republicans! I'm not saying that exercise isn't the cause of shorter life-spans, and there is certainly data to support it, but comparing maps alone is kind of silly. There are a lot of maps that look like that.
  - pg 13y ago
    Comparing maps is no sillier than looking for correlations between any two data sets. And indeed, I suspect the resemblance between your map and mine is not a coincidence either.
    - 8_hours_ago 13y ago
      "Silly" was perhaps a strong word. My point was that there are a lot of heat maps of the US that have a similar distribution, and those similarities could very well be due to a spurious relationship.
niels_olson 13y ago
Can someone correlate this data with red-blue voting distribution at the same level (counties)? Because, by my eye, they are in lock step.
- VLM 13y ago
  The hard statistical challenge is your voting theory is pretty much a proxy for urban/rural. So you'd need some sneaky statistics to find the rare areas where you can separate the two closely matched data sources. Rephrased, I bet if you ran correlation coeff for urban/rural ratio vs both voting and death rates I bet they'd match up about the same and the coeff between urban/rural and death would be higher. Or I could be totally wrong and you're right. But what I am pretty sure I'm correct about, is this experiment would be the logical second step after your theory.
rayiner 13y ago
> The most shocking study, published in August 2012 by the journal Health Affairs, found that life expectancy for white female high-school dropouts has fallen dramatically over the past 18 years. These women are now expected to die five years earlier than the generation before them—a radical decline that is virtually unheard of in the world of modern medicine. High school graduation rates are up substantially over that time period, especially for women, so the category of "high school dropouts" probably represents a narrower pool of women today than 18 years ago.
varelse 13y ago
At the risk of losing some of the karma I've built up every time I deconstruct Google's hiring practices, here goes: High Fructose corn syrup and subsidizing horrible nutritional choices is at least partially to blame for the obesity epidemic. However, there is an element of personal choice and free will here. Ironically, one side of the political fence here will not acknowledge the former and the other side refuses to acknowledge the latter. If you choose to squander what little free time you have from your minimum wage job on sitting in front of a TV instead of burning an extra 500-1000 calories per day, you will get fat, and you will most likely die young, and that's the cost of watching TV instead of exercising. For god's sake, at least squander that time on Khan Academy or coursera. That said, this is a valid choice IMO. It's easy to forget how much life sucks for the bottom 80% when you're earning a salary in the top 5%. I can completely understand why someone with no perceived prospects for life ever getting any better would choose to numb themselves with food, TV, and alcohol. And that is a national disgrace. But from my perspective, I always had a burning motivation to prove myself and stand out from the people who dismissed me as not worth the effort. Similarly, I am regularly astounded at the different outcomes I see from immigrants who arrive here with nothing, and become millionaires within a generation. The solution IMO (and there may not be one) is to figure out how to instill that kind of passion in a higher proportion of the population (and that may not be what the corporatocracy really wants because then they might start asking some really uncomfortable questions).
- DanielStraight 13y ago
  You are greatly oversimplifying people's decisions about how to spend their time. I am not trying to defend laziness. I am just drawing to draw your attention to some of the factors you are not considering here. People often watch TV while doing things like cooking dinner or housework, which aren't compatible with serious exercise. People often watch TV at hours of the day where outdoor exercise is impractical or at least inconvenient. The decision of how to spend time isn't binary: TV or exercise. People with many family responsibilities have less free time. People who can't afford to buy time by paying for their oil changes, plumbing, etc. have less free time. It should be telling that many people who do get regular exercise get up very early to exercise before starting their normal daily activities. Even people who make exercise a priority have a hard time fitting it into a normal schedule.
dpweb 13y ago
"And No One Knows Why" Nauseating.. Health is a mess, and we're further advanced than ever in history. Education is a mess, and every person has all the knowledge of the world literally in their pocket. Personal responsibility.
Mikeb85 13y ago
My own opinion on things like diet, weight, exercise, is pretty simple. 1) Eat relative to your activity level. If you're sedentary, eat less. If you're active or an athlete, eat more. 2) Eat good food. If you don't recognize it as something that comes out of the ground or directly from an animal, don't eat it. There are a few exceptions (oils, vinegar, fermented products). Either way, you should know where it's coming from and how it's handled. If you do these two things, you should be alright. And IMO, the only things you should be drinking are: water (lots), beer (slightly less), wine (even less), milk (a little), juice (a little less). Any time I see people drinking pop as a 'beverage' and not a treat I just shake my head...

47 points by aelaguiz 13y ago

hacknat 13y ago

Because they're more obese.

elwell 13y ago
Yeah, overlay that map with this one: http://www.stratasan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Obese_population_by_county.png http://www.stratasan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Obese_po...
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  It's troubling that the color scale starts at 13.7%...
- colanderman 13y ago
  The correlation seems to break down in Appalachia -- low obesity; high mortality rate. (Aside -- the stark contrast in obesity between Colorado and Kansas is surprising.)
  - Patrick_Devine 13y ago
    I'd love to have access to the raw data to feed it into R. I'm fairly positive even with Appalachia included there is still going to be a strong positive correlation.
    - gohrt 13y ago
      That's not really how averages work, though. You can't just smash two modes of a bimodal distribution together and treat it like a unimodal distribution. I mean, you can, but it generates garbage results.
      - Patrick_Devine 13y ago
        It's hard to draw that conclusion without knowing what's in either data set. I'm fairly certain that the obesity data would have gender as one of its attributes, and it's also probable that any death statistics would include other vital stats such as height and weight at time of death. But you're right, it's certainly possible that all of the women in those states are of normal weight and it's only the men who are obese. I'm being a little glib though, it's hard to know without seeing the data.
  - 3pt14159 13y ago
    That doesn't prove anything. We are looking at the delta here. It could very easily be that the correlation breaks down in Appalachia because Appalachia has doubled its very low obesity rate to just a low obesity rate.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Something involving certain forms of resource extraction. I was working on a theory of grain related herbicides pesticides but I know for a fact coal mining via mtn top removal makes quite an ecological mess. Another not entirely far fetched idea I'm working on is livestock contamination of drinking water resulting in high constant antibiotic levels leading to more resistant infections in general. Looking at where I know there are poultry plants and dairy farms its not looking good. Its entirely possible coal tailing contamination of water kills em in Appalachia, factory livestock contamination of drinking water gets em in some rural areas, and pesticide / herbicide contamination of drinking water gets em in some areas. In that case we should in theory be able to track increased death rate by river water flow directions. For whatever reason "some contaminants" are apparently not in the Colorado river basin, but the Mississippi isn't looking good.

mynewwork 13y ago

Title: "No one knows why" Article: "female obesity and drug abuse have risen dramatically over the past two decades"

colmvp 13y ago
Well it's also important to note that they mention female high school dropouts, specifically to measure their access to health care and income opportunities, as well as health behaviors like smoking and obesity.
bdcravens 13y ago
1 in 4 women die of heart disease. 1 in 36 die of breast cancer. Which one receives more attention?
- seszett 13y ago
  Well... boobies! Heart disease just can't compete, even though it would benefit a lot more people, simply because it also affects men.
- VLM 13y ago
  You need years of life lost stats not just lifetime frequency. My grandmother's heart didn't get her until she was in her 80s. If she had a miracle perfect heart well maybe she would have made a couple more years at most till the kidneys, or the liver, or something else got her. Unfortunately I know of too many women, practically girls really, who get cancer in their 20s or maybe 30s. Without the cancer they'd probably have had another 50 healthy years before the heart disease got em. Edited to add you hear a lot about people dying of heart disease when they're 30 because its shockingly unusual, usually heart problems kill bluehairs. But cancer always seems to strike someone like my kids friends mom who's only 30something, that unfortunately seems normal for cancer?
  - bdcravens 13y ago
    Good points. Though I'm thinking the 80 year old dying of heart disease is less common than the 30 year old obese person who is buying death on installment plan

croisciutto 13y ago

Perhaps dying younger is simply that being educated and joining the workforce entails thinking more. Low grade, high-volume thinking requires persistent states of arousal, not dissimilar from stress, and ultimately causing stress. The symptoms are reduced immune activity, increased blood pressure, poor digestion, etc. The health risks of chronic overwork (heart attack, stroke) do seem to be the same as those of excess hedonism (heart attack, stroke). The double whammy is that people who work too hard tend to 'play hard' during their off-duty hours. They think of it as necessary and well-earned relaxation, which is why they do it, but it isn't quite the same thing. Drinking, smoking and other drugs merely produce more arousal, though it is interpreted as being pleasant because the ego is not threatened. I think the foregoing ideas are why some religious traditions have specified a day of complete rest, which breaks the cycle somewhat

ck2 13y ago

Is it just me or are areas of the map that show "improvements" where you would more likely find immigration? Just a very casual observation, may be completely wrong.

bilbo0s 13y ago
Hm... You may be right. That's actually pretty depressing... it means there may be no improvement... just a general worsening being masked by female immigrants. I wonder if female immigrants were excluded from the populations used in these two studies?
VLM 13y ago
Looks closer to percent urbanization. Migrant farm worker land not looking very blue. My pasty white state matches pretty well with urbanization, not so well with racial variation. This explanation doesn't seem to hold in other areas. I wonder how well it corresponds to grain related pesticide and insecticide use per county. This seems to work, Los Vegas is not exactly a legendary wheatfield. CA has a lot of agribusiness but not as much grain as Iowa or Montana. Ahh the waving cornfields of Manhattan Island NYC. It seems to match up...
- ck2 13y ago
  Agriculture is far from the only immigration job. Everything from construction to tech.

DanBC 13y ago

Why people say "obese" they either mean the everyday use of the word "really fat", or they mean (as here) the formal definition of "BMI > 30". There are problems with BMI - we hear about the trained athlete with high muscle mass and very little body fat who has a BMI of 38. Luckily most people are nothing like that trained athlete so BMI is handy for this kind of mass population stuff. As Mikeb85 says, the map posted by elwell starts at 13.7%, and that lowest band goes up to nearly a quarter of the population at 23.3%! NHBLI have a nice chart here. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/obesity/bmi_tbl.htm http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/obesity/bmi_tbl.htm The average American man is 69 inches tall. He'd have to be 203 pounds to have a BMI of 30. The average American woman is 64 inches. She'd weigh 174 pounds. Fat shaming is bad, and stupid, and shouldn't be tolerated. But there is a problem with people's shifting perceptions of what "fat" and "obese" mean. People who would have been called fat are now called "shapely" or "curvy". People do not recognise obesity any more.

huttbutt 13y ago
>fat shaming is bad, and stupid No, it's not. Obesity is unhealthy and usually the result of bad habits. All the ex-fatties I know think this "fat acceptance" crusade is bad and stupid.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > >fat shaming is bad, and stupid > No, it's not. Yes it is. > Obesity is unhealthy and usually the result of bad habits. Shaming isn't therapy for bad habits, and "usually" wouldn't justify it even if it was. > All the ex-fatties I know think this "fat acceptance" crusade is bad and stupid. And...so what?
- VLM 13y ago
  "Obesity is ... usually the result of bad habits." wrong, usually poor education / bad for profit dietary advice. Wanna sit around all day and eat while watching TV? Sure go ahead here's a bottomless bag of celery to eat. Or carrots. Or lettuce. Good luck getting fat on that. But if the .com and .gov make a lot of money promoting corn chips, it doesn't matter that corn is terrible for mammals other than fattening up livestock on the farm, there's money to be made, pork those babes up with corn chips. Ditto 2 liters of corn syrup soda, bowls of ice cream, anything with refined sugar added. Get back to me when a disgusting display of gluttony involving grilled chicken ceasars salad results in obesity. On the other hand if its something that farmers slop their hogs with to fatten them up, like, say, corn products, well, guess what happens if you slop the chicks with corn products?

SmokyBourbon 13y ago

Divorce and having fewer children. If there are fewer people around to watch out for you or take care if you, chances are you won't live as long.

tekalon 13y ago

I read somewhere (long ago and I can't remember where) that the rate of heart disease increased in women the same time more women worked outside their homes. Add that to obesity, education and all the other options the article and commenters have mentioned. Issues like this isn't often one or two things, its many that build up.

smokey42 13y ago

As some suggested a correlation with obesity, I'd like to highlight another correlation. Recent findings showed that obesity can be an side-effect of stress. [There is a genetic component to it, such that people who can compensate detrimental effects of stress to the brain, become obese as a side-effect. People who can't, don't become obese but have detrimental effects to their brain. They're fucked both ways. :-( But this is merely a second hand recitation of what I heard a scientist say. Grain of salt, blah blah.] Nevertheless, the biggest source of stress is socio-economic stress. It's way more stressful than any "direct" stress. Trying to find some of the relevant resources: * http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db50.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db50.htm shows correlation between socio-economic status and obesity * http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831158/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831158/ Linkage between obesity and some dopamine pathways are also known since 2001. My own speculation: The location where mortality of women is highest produce the highest socio-economic stress to women. Additional speculation: This ought to happen in high or in low income areas and may be linked with income inequality within the community.

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

Yes we know. Ladies now smoke as much as men do. In my country young women smoke now more than men. You don't smoke to be a man anymore(stupid male reason), now you smoke for getting slim, or looking "sophisticated" or any other stupid female reason. Females now work as hard as men. In the past they had to raise the family only, now they raise the family and work with all the crap of working(stress), they eat the same fast food shit that males do(obesity), they sleep as bad as men do. Females now use hormones for not getting pregnant, breast and ovary's cancer incidence has gone up.(they survive more years through).

taejo 13y ago
> Females now use hormones for not getting pregnant, breast and ovary's cancer incidence has gone up. It seems that hormonal birth control slightly elevates the risk of breast cancer, but reduces the risk of ovarian cancer by a larger percentage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormonal_contraception#Effects_on_rates_of_cancers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormonal_contraception#Effects...).

deleted 13y ago

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flexie 13y ago

Obesity and lack of activity. It's easy to see for us outsiders that are used to other sizes. Where I am in Europe, a typical woman has a body not that far from the fashion world's ideals which Americans often call skinny bitches, "anorectic" or similar derogatory terms. Look at pictures of Americans 40 years ago. Most were slender. Now, many if not most could use different eating habits.

atlanticus 13y ago
Apparently you are not in northern Europe.
- flexie 13y ago
  No, but used to be. There we have the same obesity problems, though still on a smaller scale.

001sky 13y ago

This is a flaw in their statistics. Just eyeball the map, and you can see the red counties are in areas of remote/economic depravation. Over the course of 100 years, you are getting "the thin end of the gene pool" as others move out. So, your baseline samples are not the same. Also the gene-pool will be more startified by education as time goes on (ie, its more "common" to have edu degrees), so as the weaker become educated again only the weakest do not. So their is instability in the relationship between the proxy variables for "class" and success and the genetic ones. This article is a good example why researchers (and reporters) need to be boots on the ground and understand what they are dealing with. None of this would be surprising to anyone who hase been to many of the remote rural areas flagged in red here.

drakaal 13y ago

No one knows why.... Obesity is up. As we move away from a labor economy fewer people work on farms and factory, we eat the same number of calories, or more, and do less. More women are in the work place, and that's stressful... Job related stress shortens lives. Sure in the old nuclear family where mom stayed home and raised the kids that was stressful too, but with nannies and day care we still have people in that role, and now you have more single moms doing work and home on their own. Ethnic diversity due to an increase in the number of immigrants from developing nations. We have a lot more people from countries that had much shorter life spans than the US. Enough to move the numbers. Like it or not while Asia has people who live the longest the average is much shorter than those from Europe, and Mexico and Central America are much shorter still.

VLM 13y ago
There's a chronological problem with your theoretically logical idea where the farm worker collapse started near the turn of the last century (1900) and smoothly over the decades pretty much anyone who was leaving the farm had left by 1970 but fatness indicators like number of diagnosed diabetes patients didn't start expanding (sorry for pun) until late 1990s (about 20 years after an explosion in corn syrup consumption in the USA, surely just a coincidence). So there is a 90 to 20 year gap depending how you want to run the numbers to explain, why the workers are already gone but not sick yet. There's also a numerical hole where at peak we're talking about 10 million or so american farm workers leaving the farm over the 1900s, but 1/3 or so of 400 million aka over 100 million getting fat. If 10 million changed jobs and 10 million got fat, even if we don't have data to prove its the same 10 mil my spidey sense would tingle, but you're off by a factor of ten. Also the point of the article graph is rural Montana is not the place to be if you're a woman aspiring to be old, but rural Montana never had quite the same industrial production as NYC or the WWII aircraft plants in WA. So thats a geographic issue. The problem with your theory about short lived Mexicans is my general lifetime knowledge about where you'll find illegals living maps pretty decently with where people are actually living longer. Its as though immigrants were not exposed to certain industrial or agricultural toxins in the 3rd world that we expose our own kids to. For example no one in New Mexico (well, there's an accurate name) can speak English anymore, but the article map show's they're ridiculously healthy compared to, say, pasty white rural northern Wisconsin where I'm pretty sure they have a hunting season for illegals. Which is interesting. (edited to add, I liked your post a lot, because it used logical thinking to come up with apparently reasonable falsifiable hypothesis, which is awesome, keep on doing it. Problems need theoreticians and experimentalists to solve them, just one isn't going to do it alone. Theoreticians do need thick skin since 90% of their theories aren't going to work and its nothing personal)

pg 13y ago

That map looks remarkably like this one: http://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/data/facts.html http://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/data/facts.html

deleted 13y ago
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8_hours_ago 13y ago
And kind of like this map! http://www.startribune.com/177786361.html http://www.startribune.com/177786361.html There's a government conspiracy to kill Republicans! I'm not saying that exercise isn't the cause of shorter life-spans, and there is certainly data to support it, but comparing maps alone is kind of silly. There are a lot of maps that look like that.
- pg 13y ago
  Comparing maps is no sillier than looking for correlations between any two data sets. And indeed, I suspect the resemblance between your map and mine is not a coincidence either.
  - 8_hours_ago 13y ago
    "Silly" was perhaps a strong word. My point was that there are a lot of heat maps of the US that have a similar distribution, and those similarities could very well be due to a spurious relationship.

niels_olson 13y ago

Can someone correlate this data with red-blue voting distribution at the same level (counties)? Because, by my eye, they are in lock step.

VLM 13y ago
The hard statistical challenge is your voting theory is pretty much a proxy for urban/rural. So you'd need some sneaky statistics to find the rare areas where you can separate the two closely matched data sources. Rephrased, I bet if you ran correlation coeff for urban/rural ratio vs both voting and death rates I bet they'd match up about the same and the coeff between urban/rural and death would be higher. Or I could be totally wrong and you're right. But what I am pretty sure I'm correct about, is this experiment would be the logical second step after your theory.

rayiner 13y ago

> The most shocking study, published in August 2012 by the journal Health Affairs, found that life expectancy for white female high-school dropouts has fallen dramatically over the past 18 years. These women are now expected to die five years earlier than the generation before them—a radical decline that is virtually unheard of in the world of modern medicine. High school graduation rates are up substantially over that time period, especially for women, so the category of "high school dropouts" probably represents a narrower pool of women today than 18 years ago.

varelse 13y ago

At the risk of losing some of the karma I've built up every time I deconstruct Google's hiring practices, here goes: High Fructose corn syrup and subsidizing horrible nutritional choices is at least partially to blame for the obesity epidemic. However, there is an element of personal choice and free will here. Ironically, one side of the political fence here will not acknowledge the former and the other side refuses to acknowledge the latter. If you choose to squander what little free time you have from your minimum wage job on sitting in front of a TV instead of burning an extra 500-1000 calories per day, you will get fat, and you will most likely die young, and that's the cost of watching TV instead of exercising. For god's sake, at least squander that time on Khan Academy or coursera. That said, this is a valid choice IMO. It's easy to forget how much life sucks for the bottom 80% when you're earning a salary in the top 5%. I can completely understand why someone with no perceived prospects for life ever getting any better would choose to numb themselves with food, TV, and alcohol. And that is a national disgrace. But from my perspective, I always had a burning motivation to prove myself and stand out from the people who dismissed me as not worth the effort. Similarly, I am regularly astounded at the different outcomes I see from immigrants who arrive here with nothing, and become millionaires within a generation. The solution IMO (and there may not be one) is to figure out how to instill that kind of passion in a higher proportion of the population (and that may not be what the corporatocracy really wants because then they might start asking some really uncomfortable questions).

DanielStraight 13y ago
You are greatly oversimplifying people's decisions about how to spend their time. I am not trying to defend laziness. I am just drawing to draw your attention to some of the factors you are not considering here. People often watch TV while doing things like cooking dinner or housework, which aren't compatible with serious exercise. People often watch TV at hours of the day where outdoor exercise is impractical or at least inconvenient. The decision of how to spend time isn't binary: TV or exercise. People with many family responsibilities have less free time. People who can't afford to buy time by paying for their oil changes, plumbing, etc. have less free time. It should be telling that many people who do get regular exercise get up very early to exercise before starting their normal daily activities. Even people who make exercise a priority have a hard time fitting it into a normal schedule.

dpweb 13y ago

"And No One Knows Why" Nauseating.. Health is a mess, and we're further advanced than ever in history. Education is a mess, and every person has all the knowledge of the world literally in their pocket. Personal responsibility.

Mikeb85 13y ago

My own opinion on things like diet, weight, exercise, is pretty simple. 1) Eat relative to your activity level. If you're sedentary, eat less. If you're active or an athlete, eat more. 2) Eat good food. If you don't recognize it as something that comes out of the ground or directly from an animal, don't eat it. There are a few exceptions (oils, vinegar, fermented products). Either way, you should know where it's coming from and how it's handled. If you do these two things, you should be alright. And IMO, the only things you should be drinking are: water (lots), beer (slightly less), wine (even less), milk (a little), juice (a little less). Any time I see people drinking pop as a 'beverage' and not a treat I just shake my head...