This has very little to do with location or genetics and everything to do with education and culture.
When I visited New York a few years ago I was shocked about how much smoking there was everywhere.
Of course, people didn't quit nicotine entirely, many moving to snus[1] instead.
But yes, varies greatly between countries. Since it's "only" been 20 years since the ban here, I'm curious to see if the numbers diverge more in the coming decades, or not.
I have had multiple people I was close to die due to smoking created health issues in the last decade. Even if smoking is not as prevalent today, we are paying the price for it now.
Every one of those points is also true in Europe (apart from possibly healthcare), unfortunately. Car dependency and car-centric development is almost everywhere, places like the Netherlands are an outlier. Fast food and ads thereof are also everywhere. Many people smoke. Etc.
I live in a rural village about 5 hours' drive from NYC. There is no public transport here.
If I drive 45 minutes to the nearest city, I can catch a train—but that train will only take me to a few destinations (primarily Albany, NYC, or Boston one way, or Buffalo, Chicago and points west the other way).
Some cities (outside of major metropolitan areas, which do generally have some kind of rail system) have intracity buses, but they tend to be underfunded and dirty.
If you've ever been on a Greyhound bus, you'd understand why that's the case.
NY politics is the problem, not anything else. That whole damn state is just so bleak, nothing gets done without so many pounds of flesh being taken out by so many parties that things just stop getting done.
At least we are now capable of passing a budget bill less than 5 months late, anyway.
It's essentially just NYC, Washington DC, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco. NYC is 80% of USA public transit usage!
It's the degree of things. I live in Ireland, in a village of a few thousand people a few km outside the city, what you might call a "suburb" in the US. I don't even have a driver's license. It's rarely an issue and can go about my life by foot. bike, and public transport.
Whatever villages that used to exist in the US have been drowned out by car-centric suburbs that were build around them. The 'village' is now the downtown-ish area of the community that tourists go see.
You are a very unusual person then, as the vast vast majority of people in not urban core Ireland have (and use) a car. I live in a Dublin suburb, and we're one of the few married couples that don't have two cars.
There's almost no way to survive in the US without a vehicle, except in a few cities (mostly NYC). You can do without a car in many European cities.
I never owned a car until I moved to the US ~10 years ago.
In the US on the other hand, it's needed a lot more.
A central problem in the US is transit between cities/states.
Since Europe was urbanized at scale long before the US, passenger rail networks were built out.
Most of the US grew with cars, and so that was just never developed.
Yeah, that's basically what I meant about non-urban core. Like, towns around Dublin are sortof OK, but public transport in the rest of Ireland makes it very inconvenient to have no car (and I've done this and it sucked).
Not anywhere near US levels. Netherlands isn't an outlier. You can get pretty much anywhere in Switzerland with good public transport. Denmark, Germany, Austria, Northern Italy, France, Belgium, all have excellent public transportation networks with wide coverage.
> Many people smoke.
This is the one "healthy living" area where Europe lags the US. But many people in the US vape and I'm not sure it's any healthier.