[CrayZee]

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To me it's significant because I'm thinking some portion of your life at the end -- let's pick an arbitrary number, maybe 10% -- you're probably going to be in poor repair and maybe feeling bad. That's a lot of what kills you in the first place, going through a decline where more and more things fail in your system.

So if in the US dying at 77 and losing 10% means you have good years till about 69, and in Switzerland or wherever you like you get to live to to 83 and lose 10% to get 75 good years, you have almost as many good years if you lived in Switzerland as you have in total if you lived in the U.S. Those extra good years that late in the game strike me as providing a whole lot of overall value to your life.

All the more so since you'll likely spend most or all of them in retirement, where you can really enjoy them, rather than wasting away at work.

So, I think that smallish difference is effectively much more life-enhancing than it might appear at first glance.

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Adding another 5.6 years or whatever to your life is significant and I was completely ignoring the "enjoying your later years comfortably" part looking at the numbers alone. I guess my point was that we are generally better off in our environment than one in a 3rd world nation somewhere in Africa (where food is harder to obtain and the environment unstable). So, in a way, this is a "good problem."

At least we have somewhat of a choice to live healthy in our society as opposed to other people. So living in a world where obesity is a problem is better than one living where hunger is.

But yeah, living a little bit healthier has a causal effect on the number in the first place unless you are of a strong genetic background like George Burns, smoking and drinking daily, or something.