The link to this article is on our side page but keeping healthy, we now know, not only keeps us alive longer but our quality of life improves, and we hopefully avoid the misery conditions that can be avoided with moderate daily exercise and good nutrition. It all matters!
Exercise and eat healthier together as a family and the benefits will last a lifetime.
Bob
“The United States spends more than the rest of the world on health care and leads the world in the quality and quantity of its health research, but that doesn’t add up to better health outcomes,” Murray said in a statement.
One place the U.S. does better – treating some cancers.
“Five-year survival for breast cancer and colorectal cancer are higher in the U.S. than in many OECD countries,” they wrote.
The biggest killers: clogged arteries (known medically as ischemic heart disease), lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and road accidents.
But the diseases that caused the most misery, known in the lingo as disability-adjusted life years, are low back pain, major depressive disorder, other musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety disorders.
In fact, Americans are more disabled now than they were 10 years ago, the researchers found.
“The gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, a measure of the expected number of healthy years that an individual loses to disability—increased from 9.4 to 10.1 years. In other words, individuals in the US are living longer, but not necessarily in good health,” they concluded.
“The United States spends the most per capita on healthcare across all countries, lacks universal health coverage, and lags behind other high-income countries for life expectancy and many other health outcome measures. High costs with mediocre population health outcomes at the national level are compounded by marked disparities across communities, socio-economic groups, and race and ethnicity groups.”
One underlying cause is poor diet. “The most important dietary risks in the U.S. are a diet low in fruits, low in nuts and seeds, high in sodium, high in processed meats, low in vegetables and high in transfats,” they wrote.
"For the first time we're saying that the composition of diet, which is made up 14 different components, things like fruits, grains, nuts, seeds (and) other aspects of diet being analyzed is the biggest determinant of health in the US, followed by smoking, followed by obesity, and then followed by high blood sugar and physical inactivity," Murray told NBC news.
"So if you put all of those together there's huge potential to improve health in the U.S. and in fact get ahead of other high income countries if we were to address these modifiable risks."
First Lady Michelle Obama said the report shows communities and policymakers need to help Americans eat better. "We’re going to be working with food companies and restaurants who are offering more healthy options to families so that when they go into a restaurant they have some decent choices," she said at an event at the White House for her "Let's Move" campaign.
But Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, who chaired a National Academy of Sciences panel that reported on U.S. health in January, says it’s more complex than just bad habits.
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