Where you live can be a matter of life and death.
Spencer Platt / Getty Images
While rich Americans tend to have high life expectancies regardless of where they live, the life expectancies for poor Americans varies by about five years based on their city, according to the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers attributed the gap not to differences in access to health care or rates of income inequality, but rather to longer-living poor people residing "in affluent cities with highly educated populations and high levels of local government expenditures, such as New York and San Francisco."
Poorer people are living longer in cities that have taken measures to lower smoking and obesity rates, such as wide bans on indoor smoking and trans fats in New York and San Francisco, and which have abundant outdoor public spaces to promote exercise.
The geography of life expectancy in the bottom income quartile.
Raj Chetty et. al. / Via healthinequality.org
The geographical difference can be best put in perspective, researchers said, by considering that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate life expectancy across the country would increase by three years if all forms of cancer were eliminated. "Hence, it is as if low-income men in New York and San Francisco – which have the highest levels of life expectancy – are immune from cancer," the study's authors wrote, "while men in Detroit or Indianapolis – which have low levels of life expectancy for the poor – are not."
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/1ViS9MI
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