Rural life expectancy

Nautilus - People who live in rural parts of the United States have significantly shorter lifespans compared to those in urban areas. In fact, rural working age adults (aged 25 to 54) are 43 percent more likely to die from natural causes than those who live in cities, according to data from 2019. The gap has widened from a 9 percent difference in mortality when the trend first emerged three decades ago. Now a new study in the journal Economics & Human Biology is attempting to unravel the multifarious causes. 

In the first-of-its-kind study, researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign combined data from a variety of sources to get a more complete picture of the problem…. They found that chronic stress, nicotine use, obesity, and diet stood out as major biological contributors to the trend.