Metadish, Fresh from NYC

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Yesterday I posted about how New Yorkers are now living longer than the average American.  Still, even as the average American’s life expectancy is increasing and is currently at 77.9 years there are 41 other countries with longer life expectancies than that, including Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.

“Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Still researchers say that it’s not as simple as blaming it all on a lack of any sort of universal health care in the U.S.  It also has to with our astounding laziness and love of all things artery clogging and fattening.  Oh yeah, that and the fact that poor black people are really fucking up the curve for the rest of us.

Adults in the United States have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Nearly a third of U.S. adults 20 years and older are obese, while about two-thirds are overweight, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

“The U.S. has the resources that allow people to get fat and lazy,” said Paul Terry, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “We have the luxury of choosing a bad lifestyle as opposed to having one imposed on us by hard times.”

• Racial disparities. Black Americans have an average life expectancy of 73.3 years, five years shorter than white Americans.

Black American males have a life expectancy of 69.8 years, slightly longer than the averages for Iran and Syria and slightly shorter than in Nicaragua and Morocco.

• A relatively high percentage of babies born in the U.S. die before their first birthday, compared with other industrialized nations.

Forty countries, including Cuba, Taiwan and most of Europe had lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. in 2004. The U.S. rate was 6.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births. It was 13.7 for Black Americans, the same as Saudi Arabia.

“It really reflects the social conditions in which African American women grow up and have children,” said Dr. Marie C. McCormick, professor of maternal and child health at the Harvard School of Public Health. “We haven’t done anything to eliminate those disparities.”

Maybe after we are finished “liberating” Iraq we can get our soldiers home and have them liberate our fat asses from corporate whoredom and the political machine that takes lobbyist monies to turn a blind eye to the fatty foods and toxins that are pumped into the population every hour of every day.

If only there was some way we could figure out how politicians could make money from us being healthy maybe we would stand a chance.

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