Questions,+Answers+&+Info

=**Life Expectancy in the U.S.**=

1) What factors impact life expectancy? Improvement in public health, nutrition, and medicine can all be good factors while there are negative factors aswell. Some negative factors might be homocides, suicides, heart diseases, strokes, liver disease, cancer, diabetes and AIDS or HIV.

**Nutrition**
Some foods contribute to health which is a factor that impacts life expectancy. Yogurt is a food that has been around for centuries and has also been proved to improve a person's health. For example in the early 1500's King Francois was prescribed a diet of yogurt. The diet actually saved the French monarch's life!

2) How has it changed over the years? Women have always had longer life expectancy rates than men; soemtimes up to a 10 year margin! The average life expectancy at birth for women in the U.S. is 79 years and 72 years for men. Although women can expect to live longer than men, the gap is closing. Death rates have begun to converge in the past 20 years. Some researchers attribute the convergence to women taking on the behaviors and stresses formerly considered the domain of males -- smoking, drinking, and working outside the home. For both men and women in the U.S., they could expect to live up to 78 years of age. A hundred years ago, the life expectancy was 48 years! This is an improved difference but the U.S. is not the number 1 country for life expectancy. It is actually number 40 in the world.

3) Life expectancy in the U.S. compared to other Countries/Regions At the top of the list for best life expectancy is Andorra: a baby born there can expect to live 83 and a half years. The top 5 countries with the lowest life expectancy rates are Lesotho; 39.9 years, Zimbawe; 39.5 years, Zambia; 38.4 years, Angola; 37.6, ,Swaziland; 32.2 years. The lowest 36 countries are all in Africa.

Interesting Facts
A Hispanic born in 2006 could expect to live about 80 years and seven months, the government estimates. Life expectancy for a white is about 78, and for a black, just shy of 73 years. An estimated 40 percent of them are immigrants, who in some cases arrived after arduous journeys to do taxing manual labor. It takes a fit person to accomplish that, suggesting that the United States is gaining some of the healthiest people born in Mexico and other countries. However, experts say that immigrant hardiness diminishes within a couple of generations of living here. Many believe it's because the children of immigrants take up smoking, fast-food diets and other habits blamed for wrecking the health of other ethnic populations.