Access to healthcare might be an answer. (Probably not the only answer though, but likely other answers will be aligned similarly)
Amish people tend to be healthier in their old age than an average American [0], ethough their total life expectancy is lower (but there is a subset that lives much longer - on average to 85 - and they are subject to genetic studies [1]).
Of course, only 4 per cent of Amish are obese, even though their typical diet is not exactly vegetarian (meat, dairy products etc.)
[0] https://time.com/5159857/amish-people-stay-healthy-in-old-ag...
[1] https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2017/11/amish-longevi...
Mormons also seem to be healthier than average Americans [2]. Of course, the religious ban on tobacco and alcohol might help with that.
[2] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-04-26-me-52680-...
> Conclusions. The high prevalence of obesity in the United States contributes substantially to its poor international ranking in longevity.
Low American life expectancy seems to result from other factors (obesity, high homicide rates, etc).
Otherwise wevcan cherry pick pairs of data points to match up with whatever belief one likes to hold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_analysis
Even survival analysis is far from perfect because its correlational, not causal. There are other techniques such as front door criteria etc. to figure these out.
This is contrary to what I recall reading previously, so I looked up some sources. One study says: “When people come to the United States, they are positively selected, so people coming here are usually younger and healthier,” Baluran said. “What researchers found is that the longer people [immigrants] stay in the U.S., their health begins to deteriorate; by the time [they] reach the second and third generation, the health advantage that immigrants have almost disappeared.”
https://asamnews.com/2021/12/23/immigrants-asians-live-healt...
For example, the data distortion caused by having younger asians in the United states is an example of Simpson's paradox. These can be eliminated using survival analysis
My aim isn't to cherry pick but simply to describe the distribution of outcomes we currently observe.
I wonder how much of this is explained by the obesity epidemic. And this isn't something that is solved by better access to healthcare - the best treatment that modern medicine has to offer (diet and exercise) is kind of obvious and accessible to everyone. One can argue that access to healthy and cheap nutrition options matters, but again, this is not something that one would classify as "healthcare".
And I think the jury is out on “fresh produce” being the key differentiator. It’s hard to find real science that backs that theory up.
I don't know if redlining is the only reason for this gap, or even one of the most important, but it's obviously a part of the story. If you're going to make generalizations about entire cultures this way, I think the onus is on you to engage with the history, even if only to say why you think it's not playing a part here.
Redlining is a huge big deal; despite ending in the early 1970s, it literally defines the neighborhood boundaries across much of Chicagoland in 2021. And grocery stores are scarce in redlined neighborhoods, but not as much in working class Mexican neighborhoods.
Or look at a place like south-suburban Olympia Fields, which is majority Black but wasn't redlined (presumably, it's where a lot of upwardly-mobile families locked into Lawndale and Englewood fled to). Plenty of grocery options.
Do you really think redlining has nothing at all to do with this? That seems like an extraordinary claim.
Why does "de facto redlining obviously lives on"? How do you know that the areas with less investment in the west side of Chicago suffer race-based discrimination in investment (i.e. "redlining") as opposed to data-based, rational investment decisions?
You can raise the standard of living in the redlined neighborhoods, and that does happen at the margins, but it happens slowly and only when economic conditions across the city are good.
So no, it's not the case that Whole Foods or Pete's is just going to spontaneously site a new store in K-town. They're not avoiding that area because they're racist, but they are avoiding it because of racism.
Regardless, it is not "de facto" redlining, as redlining is race-based discrimination in investment, and that is not what is happening now. If you are criticizing rational, data-based, non-discriminatory investment, then you should not caracterize it as redlining, as the defining characteristic of redlining (i.e. race-based discrimination) is lacking in the current situation.
> Access to healthcare might be an answer. (Probably not the only answer though, but likely other answers will be aligned similarly)
I look forward to hearing how Mexican Americans enjoy better access to healthcare than non-Hispanic white Americans.
First off, it’s not necessarily calculated the same when it comes to stillbirths versus infant deaths, which drastically skew numbers.
Second, other factors unrelated or weakly correlated to healthcare systems can impact life expectancy (alcohol use, diet, traffic accidents, suicide).
Third, racial differences in longevity.
> Third, racial differences in longevity.
You may want to investigate the healthcare reasons for these.