I get the feeling that Universal Healthcare (medicare for all) would probably level the difference? What else is responsible for the almost 4yr difference with e.g. France? Is it diet? Is the air/water worse in the US?
A lot of Eastern Europe was doing very poorly a generation or two ago, and we know that living through a period of hunger will cause your children to be more likely to gain weight.
Less so than regulation, just the market making it difficult for a lot of people to eat healthily, less-processed, and fresh with regularity.
This is talking about places that don't have a Whole Foods nearby. (Or often any grocery store!)
Sometimes my wife convince me to try American candy/foods that we buy in these "foreign foods stores" locally, because she grew up eating some of them in her country.
And every time we check the contents by reading the nutrition-labels or checking with apps like Yuka, it turns out that the stuff Americans put in the mouth and stomach are filled with stuff that is outright illegal to put in foods here in Europe.
So if I were to guess, it would be related to what is legal to put in foods/consumables.
- Titanium dioxide (E171)
- Potassium bromate
- Azodicarbonamide
- Propylparaben
I'm sure there is more, and there is probably also stuff that is banned in the US but not in Europe.
It sometimes is annyoying though, especially around foods and medicine when something is not yet approved in Europe e.g. It's really hard to get Allulose (sugar alternative with similar properties benefitting baking); As far as I can tell it's not actually "illegal" in Europe, it's just not approved as a food, so no-one risks importing it..
https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/project/food-sec...
Which is also indirectly related to universal healthcare: since sick people cost money to the state, the government is incentivized to regulate foods more closely.
Therefore, things like public smoking bans (as we have in the UK) as well as public health campaigns around alcohol consumption and healthy eating become palatable. Regulating harmful foodstuffs becomes more important. The cost of smokers' adverse health was (and still is) enormous, and reducing that burden benefits everyone.
The true issue is secondhand smoke. That for me is what it all is about: preventing unwilling people from being exposed to smoke, full stop.
About as many people die from smoking than from secondhand smoke. Think for a minute how horrifying that is.
This is often mentioned, but it's simply not true. It's not old age itself that costs money, it's the part of your life where you need care and support. This is old age in otherwise healthy people, but smokers don't just drop dead one day, they go through as many if not more years of care and support as everyone else, they just do it younger (which costs in lost productive years too).
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cost-of-smoking-t...
There’s been a number of studies on this, and they do seem to suggest that overall smoking saves society money. E.g. here’s one from Finland
Large portion of americans eat like they have free healthcare.
What shocked me about the US when I went, was how much peptobismol people chugged down. There was not one meal in my 1 week stay there that I could digest without issue.
Just wait until you see the breakfast cereal aisle
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/americans-die-younger-than...
It's wild what you guys can find in your food. An example that keep baffling me is the near-impossibility of finding bread that isn't sweet in the US.
My understanding for Scotland/England it is a question of alcohol/drugs to some degree. I suspect it is similar for the comparison to US.
That means poorer countries tend to have worse healthcare, and less good outcomes.
It’s much more than money.
https://www.nationhoodlab.org/the-regional-geography-of-u-s-...
Obesity is primarily caused by the 1-2000 micro-decisions we make each year about what to eat, when, and how much. A free visit to the doctor now and then is just not going to move the needle much on that one way or another for most people, most of the time. Even if it could we have to ask why a $0 doctor visit would be so much more effective than a $100 doctor visit.
No, the effects you're seeing what Europeans are more fit than Americans on average is coming from somewhere else. I think the real answer is the obvious one: Food here in Europe is simply worse tasting than in the US in general. I've been here for 5 years across twice as many countries; I've never had a pizza here that even matches Little Caesar's back at home, in terms of lighting up my little monkey neurons, to say nothing of Costco. If I ever go back home I will break and get one of the two within a week of reaching the airport.
Capitalism is an optimization process that has optimized the heck out of food reward signal. Your only real options are either to be poor enough that capitalism doesn't care about getting you the 'good stuff' - easier said than done when being poor sucks, and when the good stuff is constantly getting cheaper over time anyway - or you fight back with even harder optimization in the reverse direction. You could argue Europe is some mixture of both compared to the US.
Imagine the government pays for healthcare. The government can pass laws. What is cheaper for gov, to pass laws or to pay for healthcare. Of course they prefer to pass laws which regulate unhealthy stuff and run promotions to get people be healthy. Regular people cannot do this.
If the government isn't paying for your healthcare, then you have to pay it yourself. If you are fat, statistically, you will probably end up paying a lot more over time. This is not "wasted" money - no money you spend on your health is totally wasted. The good news is, you personally benefit from this money more than anyone else who could possibly spend it on your behalf - you reap the health benefits, the extra Christmases with the family, the bigger smiles from strangers.
Now how much does being fat cost over a lifetime? Frequently in the range of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's pure medical costs, before we even consider how much the intangibles are worth.
The thing is: Most people understand this. If you understand this, and are still fat, then on some level you are indeed saying that the money isn't worth the trade-off of changing your whole lifestyle to (a) fix this and then (b) ensure you don't end up there again.
To me that's proof that being fat is a very hard thing to change just by throwing money at it. The literal best, most incentivized person, the fat person themselves, can't even figure out how to change it, not even with at minimum tens of thousands of dollars on the line. There are probably government interventions that probably could move the needle at scale, but they are probably not "let's subsidize spinach farmers" or whatever, because an extra $2 per week for spinach is just not that much money compared to even a single $50,000 gastric bypass. They probably look more like "If your BMI drifts above 27 we send you to weight loss prison and you can come out when you're below 22 again", which sounds insane, because it is. It is simply a very hard problem to solve by throwing money at it.
I mean a government that already chose to implement free healthcare. THEN it is cheaper for them to keep people healthy.
Of course it would be cheapest to not care at all. But if you already locked into caring then it is cheaper to prevent than to treat
> government can choose to stop implementing universal healthcare, just like it can choose to implement it.
FYI in a democracy it doesn't really work like that
All the baby boomer men in my family would be dead if it wasn't for the American health care system.
Even suffering heart attacks, they didn't miss a beat to get back to going out to eat, drinking beer/wine and being massively overweight.
If you go to any restaurant at night it will be packed with fat old people stuffing their face. Most on medications so that they don't have to change their lifestyle.
No country has ever had the BMI of old people that America has right now. It is a wealth curse.