Changing habits may offer hope of living longer

Changing habits may offer hope of living longer

published September 15, 2006 12:15 am

North Carolina fared poorly in a new longevity study released Monday, ranking 40th among the 50 states. Out of 2,072 counties studied, three from North Carolina ranked among the 50 where lifespans are the shortest. Edgecombe ranked 50th from the bottom, Robeson ranked 29th and Martin ranked 25th. With the exception of South Dakota, where people in six counties have the shortest life expectancy in the United States, the counties that claimed most of the spots in the bottom 50 belonged to Southern states. Seven counties in Colorado were among those with the highest average life expectancy 81.3 years. By comparison, people living in the six South Dakota counties on the bottom have an average life expectancy of 66.6 years. Comparing states, Hawaiians live longest, an average of 80 years. People living in Mississippi have the shortest life expectancy at 73.6 years. For North Carolinians, it’s 75.8 years. As the study’s chief author, Dr. Christopher Murray, of the Harvard School of Public Health, noted, those are significant differences if you’re talking about your parent or your spouse. It can mean the difference between being around for the significant events in a grandchild’s life or having time to enjoy life after retirement.

That makes it critical that every effort be made to understand why people in North Carolina don’t live as long as people in 39 other states.

The Harvard researchers who conducted the study analyzed mortality figures provided by two federal agencies, covering the years 1982 to 2001, for county, gender, race and income. The data came from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dramatic disparities

The study found some truly dramatic disparities in longevity — more than 30 years. Longest-lived are Asian American women living in Bergen County, N.J. They have an average life expectancy of 91 years. On the other end of the scale, Native American men living in South Dakota have an average life expectancy of 58 years.

Murray said he was surprised to find that lack of health insurance explained only a small portion of the gaps.

Differences in alcohol and tobacco use, blood pressure, cholesterol and obesity seemed to drive the death rates, he said.

It will be important to pinpoint geographically defined factors, such as shared ancestry, dietary customs, local industry and propensity toward physical activity that influence those health risks, he said.

“Something very geographic is going on,” but typical analytic methods miss that part of the story because researchers tend to look at race, income and education, but rarely at place,” he said.

“Some really interesting patterns aren’t related to those usual factors.

“Perhaps it is shared ancestry or the way people make a living. The tricky part is figuring it out. It is not simply income and race.”

Other studies

In the meantime, other Harvard studies provide clues about some of the factors that contribute to longevity. In one study, jointly conducted by Harvard and the University of Athens Medical School in Athens, Greece, and released in 2003, researchers found that those who strongly adhered to a Mediterranean diet had improved longevity compared to study participants who did not follow that diet as closely. The traditional Mediterranean diet consists of an abundance of vegetables, legumes, fruits, nuts and cereals and regular use of olive oil, moderate amounts of fish and dairy products (mostly yogurt or cheese), small amounts of red meat and moderate consumption of alcohol, usually in the form of wine consumed at meals.

Another study, released in 2004, found that both weight and exercise are strong and independent predictors of premature death in women. The word “independent’’ is important here. The study found that a high level of physical activity did not eliminate the risk of premature death associated with obesity and that being lean did not counteract the risk of premature death associated with inactivity. (Those participants who exercised more than 3.5 hours per week were considered physically active.) Compared to physically active, lean women, inactive and obese women had nearly a two and half-fold increase in their risk of premature death.

Changing lifestyles

In other words, whatever other factors may be in play – genetics, environmental risks, etc. — exercise and healthy eating habits contribute to living longer than a person otherwise might. That’s reassuring because those are factors we can control.

But, more than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, which suggests that there are factors in our environment that undermine the goal of eating well and exercising.

We all know what they are — high stress jobs, too much television, an infrastructure that encourages driving everywhere instead of walking or bicycling, fast food.

It may be that further studies will prove otherwise, but the evidence so far suggests that if we’d change our lifestyles, we’d add years to our lives.

http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060915/OPINION01/60914015/1194