WALL STREET JOURNAL: Americans are smoking less, driving safer and have cut back on heavy boozing, leading to healthier and longer lives over the past half-century.
Unfortunately, Americans also are getting fatter, overdosing on drugs and getting shot more frequently, factors which have all but wiped out those positive trends, according to a paper by Susan Stewart, a researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and David Cutler, an economics professor at Harvard University.
The two examine the contribution of behavioral change to public health from 1960 to 2010. “While health is often thought of in terms of diagnosed medical conditions, it is modifiable behavioral risk factors such as obesity and smoking that account for the largest portion of deaths each year,” Stewart and Cutler write… (more)
