Health Impact News Comments: As life expectancy in the U.S. continues to drop, more media sources are picking up the story. What is sorely lacking in most of these reports, however, is any real dialog as to what is causing the problem. In the video below “obesity” is correctly observed as a correlating trend, but no discussion on why. Few in the mainstream media are making any connection to our nation’s dependency on prescription drugs and the poor quality of our nation’s food as supplied by industrial agriculture.

by Karen Pallarito, Health.com
CNN.com

(Health.com) — Life expectancy in most U.S. counties lags behind that of the world’s healthiest nations, in some cases by 50 years or more, according to a new analysis of government data.

For instance, in Holmes County, Mississippi, which has the lowest life expectancy in the country, a woman can expect to live 73.5 years, the average life span that women in the healthiest nations had in 1957 and have since far surpassed.

To determine how American life spans stack up internationally, researchers from the U.S. and the U.K. compared life expectancies in the U.S. to a moving average of those in the 10 nations with the lowest death rates, a group that includes other affluent countries such as Switzerland, Australia, Japan, and Canada.

Between 2000 and 2007, the researchers found, more than 80% of U.S. counties fell below the life-expectancy bar set by that group of leading nations, even though the U.S. spends more on health care per capita than any other country in the world.

Given the increasing life expectancy in countries like Canada and Australia, the widespread pattern of decline in the U.S. is “a huge surprise,” says Christopher Murray, M.D., one of the study’s coauthors and the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, in Seattle.

Read the full article here: http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/06/15/life.expectancy.united.states/index.html?hpt=hp_c2