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

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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

> 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.

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 shows correlation between socio-economic status and obesity

* 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.

Because they're more obese.

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

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).

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...

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.