While it is well known and a scientific fact that women live longer than men, recent findings also show that shorter people live longer than taller people.
According to CNBC Make It in an interview with two longevity experts Jean-Marie Robine and David Sinclair being short used to be a negative factor for longevity but the pendulum has now swung in the opposite direction.
Robine is an expert demographer who has studied the relationship between health and longevity and Sinclair is co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School.
Why Shorter People?
“Many years ago people were much shorter than [they are] today,” because they were often poorly nourished during the first year of their lives,” says Robine.
“They weren’t able to develop properly and they were not able to fight against infectious diseases. Historically, at the population level, we [were] associating short size with poor development during the first year of life, and with a high level of mortality. But currently for people who are shorter, “if you have the best of what is possible, in terms of wealth and education, the shorter are living longer than the taller,” adds Robine.
The reason for this is because when you are taller, you need more cell replications to fill your body, and this can just exhaust you further.
Studies also show that shorter smaller bodies have lower death rates and fewer diet-related chronic diseases, especially past middle age. Their lifespans appear to be longer.
In a survey involving 2,500 Finnish male athletes it was found that cross-country skiers who were shorter by about six inches typically lived almost seven years longer than basketball players.
According to Sinclair the smaller you are, whether you’re a dog or a human it means you will live longer inversely. That is also the reason why among people, most women live longer than men.
“It turns out that the height of women perfectly matches their increased longevity,” says Sinclair.
Resistance of Women
In addition to that Robine says that, “Women are more resistant to mortality [and] to death than men because they are just resisting more to difficulties. Women may also feel responsible for not only their own lives, but also their children’s lives. With this in mind, ‘they have to be stronger’, and hang on a bit longer than men.”
“As long as a man is staying healthy without disability, his level of mortality is the same as the level of a woman. [But] men are poorly surviving if they are not in very good health. And women are much more resistant to ‘not perfect’ health.”
In fact it is interesting to note that women live longer despite enduring more hardship in society.
“It’s just so amazing women are living longer because it is well-known and well-acknowledged that our societies are not treating women very well, so we would expect the opposite.”
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