this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Women live longer everywhere, but what's crazy is the huge difference in the countries.
I clicked through some and the smallest gap was less than two years (already forgot which one, clicked too fast), but in Vietnam the gap is 9.3 years. How come?
Smoking and drinking is an almost exclusively male pastime.
I’m guessing hard labor also especially in third world countries .
lol what? Maybe 40 years ago
*in Vietnam
Men tend to be less risk adverse. IE do more stupid shit.
This is more of a measurable issue in nations with more old fashioned ideas about male/female roles.
Life expectancy favors biological females, irrespective of dietary factors.
The theory is that when something goes wrong with the X chromosome in women, there's a backup. With XY, males do not enjoy that safeguard.
This continues into maturity; 1.6 times the number of men died from covid-19 compared to women.
Same for heart disease, really, all chronic diseases.
There are studies going in every direction(nobody likes to be told their bodies don't operate as well as another's), but those stats are what we're working with.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Ill have to look that up sometime.
So I didn't reply to you last night because I really wanted to look into this.
Unortunately, I can't find why, specifically, Vietnamese women live so much longer than the men. I did find two contrary articles, one that concludes Vietnamese women actually have less access to healthcare than men, and as a result, live 11 of their lifetime years sick, while Vietnamese men live eight of their lifetime years sick, leaving women with 68 healthy years and Vietnamese men with 62 healthy years.
Those are the only Vietnamese specific statistics I found related to life expectancy between genders, but they are interesting, especially relative to that huge gap in base life expectancy.
Hey, late reply, but since it seemed to interest you, I'd like to share some thoughts I had in the meantime. It's mostly based on limited personal observations.
Smoking just has to play a significant role in that. You super rarely see any women smoking, and I really mean super extremely rarely, in the whole country. But men of all ages (including some teenagers) smoke everywhere, constantly. With the drinking, it's maybe a bit similar but way less extreme, cuz there is no stigma against women drinking (again, limited personal observation! might be different in other regions or small villages)
But then it hit me: the biggest factor could be drugs like amphetamines; stuff that overworked factory workers use to stay awake, but also shop clerks, lorry and bus drivers etc. literally an endless list. Work time is generally WAY too long, people simply cannot earn enough to survive without "little helpers". Drug use in this context is a real problem, government doesn't hide it.
I suspect that men tend to use that stuff much more than women.
And I sure suspect that the use of amphetamines does not increase one's life span. Interesting study; small but wonderfully selected sample group imo. Check the GPT-generated summary at the end.
Anyway, thanks for your reply, but to be super honest, I didn't really understood it 🙈, can you maybe send me the articles? Just if you still have them, not super important.
Was that the "Vietnamese women have 11 years sick, Viet men have 8?"
That's this one: https://ampe.vnexpress.net/news/news/vietnamese-live-longer-yet-suffer-many-diseases-survey-4208834.html
There's also some good national library of medicine articles about the cultural differences like Viet women trying to heal themselves, in contrast to the men: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6338901/
You know what, this is a great hypothesis!
You're definitely right about amphetamines being bad for you, I'm sure I read articles about consequential heart failure because of amphetamines, and when I was in Vietnam vices were exactly as you say, I almost never saw a woman smoking, but all of the men smoked and drank energy drinks!
Like multiple a day, while they were driving or exercising in the square, delivering packages, everywhere.
I'll go look back at my original reply and get those articles to you.