Why Are American Women's Life Expectancies Getting Shorter?

Women are not expected to live as long these days -- well, I guess you could've seen that one coming. From The Post:

For the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women.

In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation's women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today.

The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas. The most dramatic change occurred in two areas in southwestern Virginia (Radford City and Pulaski County), where women's life expectancy has decreased by more than five years since 1983.

The trend appears to be driven by increases in death from diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema and kidney failure. It reflects the long-term consequences of smoking, a habit that women took up in large numbers decades after men did, and the slowing of the historic decline in heart disease deaths.

It may also represent the leading edge of the obesity epidemic. If so, women's life expectancy could decline broadly across the United States in coming years, ending a nearly unbroken rise that dates to the mid-1800s. Life Expectancy Drops for Some U.S. Women

You can see how this would have happened. The economy has changed in an incredible way, with women coming into the workforce, the bulk of work moving from the farm to the office building and in particular the computer. Women have always outlived men, and now I guess all things being equal, all things are getting more equal. You just wish it could have shifted the other way, men getting healthier.

Skipping down, we see the big numbers:

In the study, [Christopher J.L.] Murray and collaborators at the Harvard School of Public Health examined mortality and cause-of-death data for the United States from 1961 through 1999. They divided the country into 2,068 units, including cities, counties or combinations of counties.

Across that four-decade period, average life expectancy nationwide increased from 66.9 years to 74.1 years for men, and from 73.5 years to 79.6 years for women.

Here's a bit of a clue about what's going on here...

Unlike some European countries, the United States does not collect health information other than birth and death statistics at the local level. Instead, there are national, state and regional surveys of people's health, behavior and access to medical care. Trends those studies have picked up shed light on what is happening in the 1,000 counties.

Obesity has risen markedly in the past two decades, with women more affected than men. About 33 percent of women are now obese, compared with 31 percent of men. Extreme obesity is twice as common in women (7 percent) as in men (3 percent).

Being overweight greatly increases the risk of developing Type 2, or "adult-onset," diabetes. A national survey in 2002 found that 85 percent of diabetics were overweight or obese.

In recent years, the prevalence of high blood pressure has been increasing in women, as well -- partly the result of weight gain. In 1990, 42 percent of women older than 60 had hypertension; by 2000 it was 51 percent. (In men, the trend is still dropping, as it has been for several decades.)

"This is a story about smoking, blood pressure and obesity," said Majid Ezzati, of the Harvard Initiative for Global Health, a co-author of the paper.

I'm jumping around here a lot, but I did want to get to this important statement:

The phenomenon appears to be not only new but distinctly American.

"If you look in Western Europe, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, we don't see this," Murray said.

All these countries are pretty similar to the US in terms of affluence and the way they live. Here's my question for you -- why is this only happening in America, and not these other places? What are we doing different, and what would we have to do to turn this trend around?