Short read: Why do Australians Live so Long?

Thanks to progress in the medical field, life expectancy across the world is rising. But is this rise uniform across the world or are some societies doing better than others. Here’s a paper that got published earlier this month comparing English speaking countries on life expectancy.

“THE AVERAGE Australian will live around two years longer than the average Briton. With Americans the gap is four. While the English-speaking world shares some similarities, Australians appear to outlive their Anglophone peers by a significant margin….since the early 1990s, Australian life expectancy has overtaken that of Canada, and is now higher than that of America, Britain, Ireland and New Zealand”

What explains this? We know the Aussies are particular about the freshness of the produce in their diet and their sporty and outdoorsy lifestyle. But what does the study show?

“Australians are healthier than a lot of their peers. Younger cohorts generally suffer fewer complications from pregnancies and births than other English-speaking countries, and are less likely to die from drug overdoses. Older age groups are also less likely to die from chronic diseases such as circulatory problems and heart disease. Cancer mortality rates are lower in Australia than they are in all other Anglophone countries, except among American men aged over 65. And Australians are also less likely to die in road accidents than other countries with high driving rates, such as America and New Zealand. Taken together, these differences amount to 1-5 years of additional life expectancy…

…The authors state that lower rates of tobacco use could explain some of these differences, as could Australia’s health-care system. Treatment is free via a universal health-insurance scheme, but many Australians are also privately insured, taking pressure off the public system. At 10.5% the government spends less on health care as a share of GDP than Britain, America or Canada but its health-care system has considerably lower rates of avoidable deaths than all of its English-speaking peers.”

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