My comment was to push back at already-posted assumptions about the U.S. healthcare system in general and obesity in particular. I have gone through the original study, but the NPR article said:
"The NIH report says that in 2002, 2003 and 2004, life expectancy in France increased by 10 months, which is a crazy pace (and I'm guessing it hasn't stayed that way)."
The likeliest explanation for a jump that large is a change in methodology, but there could be other factors (climate? there was a big heat wave in 2003). The U.S. does have a different culture and climate than these other countries.
I'm very happy to read an article that discusses the complexity of comparing life expectancies between countries, but the NPR article wasn't it and the HN comment section is just now getting to the point where people are discussing what the numbers really mean.
The podcast I linked is more along those lines as well, but it also goes into other popular measurements of national health as well, if I recall correctly.
If you're doing longevity studies in Europe, then you should get huge differences between cohorts separated by a few years due to WW2 - there are significant long-term effects (such as changes in metabolism gene expression) caused by, say, near-starvation during pregnancy or infanthood; and current longevity studies all include people who were essentially born on a battlefield as well as those who weren't due to small differences of age or location.
"The NIH report says that in 2002, 2003 and 2004, life expectancy in France increased by 10 months, which is a crazy pace (and I'm guessing it hasn't stayed that way)."
The likeliest explanation for a jump that large is a change in methodology, but there could be other factors (climate? there was a big heat wave in 2003). The U.S. does have a different culture and climate than these other countries.
I'm very happy to read an article that discusses the complexity of comparing life expectancies between countries, but the NPR article wasn't it and the HN comment section is just now getting to the point where people are discussing what the numbers really mean.
The podcast I linked is more along those lines as well, but it also goes into other popular measurements of national health as well, if I recall correctly.