Your Longevity

Yesterday I talked about longevity and life expectancy as it relates to the health care debate. Today, I would like to make it personal. What is your longevity?

Recently Newsweek magazine had a chart to help you estimate how long you might live. Life expectancy for the average American man is 75 years. For a woman it is 80 years. Many factors are beyond our control. Those would be family medical history, nationality, geography, etc. But what about the factors you can control?

Here are some factors that can extend your life expectancy. If you have a blood relative who has lived to be 95 or older, add 10 years to your baseline life expectancy. If you regularly play puzzles like Scrabble add 5 years. If you are a married man, add 5 years. Sorry ladies, if you are a married woman, it doesn’t add any years to your life expectancy.

A few others things that add a few years to your life expectancy are: eating 5 servings of fruits or vegetables daily, flossing daily, and eating nuts. And if you regularly go to church you can even add 1.7 years to your longevity.

What about those things that reduce your life expectancy? Subtract 15 years if you use IV drugs. Also subtract 15 years if you smoke. Unprotected sex with multiple partners will cut 7 years off your life.

You can subtract 5 years for every one of these activities: eating red meat more than twice a week, feeling stressed out, and slowing putting on weight. You can also lose years by drinking too much coffee and by getting less than six to eight hours of sleep a night.

While it is a helpful exercise, these calculations also bring us back to the current health care debate. American longevity is influenced by more than medical issues, and even some of the medical problems people have are not due to lifestyle. But doesn’t it make sense to do what we can to take responsibility for our lives? Our behavior can stretch or shrink our life span and can also have a positive or negative impact on U.S. health care costs. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.