Paul Mellick, health and exercise science professor at the University of St. Thomas Morrison Family College of Health, recently joined Angela Davis with MPR News to discuss the decline in life expectancy across the U.S.
From the story:
A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that American life expectancy is the lowest it’s been in two decades at 76.4 years.
And Americans live shorter lives than people in other wealthy nations like Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. That’s across all demographic groups, meaning even the richest Americans live shorter lives than their counterparts in other countries.
There are a lot of reasons for this, including poor diets, lack of access to health care, gun violence, car crashes and deaths from COVID-19. But there are also many potential solutions, some the U.S. could borrow from other countries.
Mellick: “If we look at how this looks in other countries, people are just more active throughout the day. Whether that’s walking from place to place, being more active in social settings, anything like that can play a gigantic role in how healthy we are. Additionally, when you look at where we consume calories and how we consume calories, that is varied quite a bit. ... In America, we have more available overabundant calories available to us than in other developed countries.”
