 Those YouTube users who are subscribed to my channel have a bit of a reputation. They are well known to be the wisest, most witty, and they all enjoy excellent health and happiness. One of the benefits of being a subscriber to this channel includes a greatly increased longevity. The expected lifespan of a person in the US is 77.7 years. However, my sage and urbane subscribers will all get an extra two years of life, on average, beyond that expectation. It's almost certainly the benefit of watching my videos, loaded as they are with good advice and scientific knowledge. I'm not kidding, my subscribers will statistically outlive the national average by two years. How can this be? I'm using what I'd like to call the longevity gambit, and it's a good trick of statistics. Some of you have probably already figured out the little trick because, as I said, my subscribers are all geniuses, but others may not have. Those are the ones who managed to miss the subscribe button the first time around. I'll give you a minute if you want to think about it. Pause here and then resume when you're ready. Ready? Okay, the reason you are all so above average in the prosperity and long life department is that you survive childhood. The national lifespan, often cited, is calculated at birth. It's reduced by the number of babies who only live a short time, or children who die from various causes, including disease or accident. These are very sad events, but they also cause a skewing of the lifespan data that doesn't reflect your lifespan at adulthood. Why is this a gambit, a debate tactic? Because you can see how easy it would be to tie the longevity of a person with a particular lifestyle adopted in adulthood, especially late adulthood, in a comparison with a value that is calculated from birth and affected by childhood mortality. We could be talking about vegan, or natural hygiene, or homeopathy, or a religious group, or a commercial product, all of whom claim that their adherents live unnaturally long lives. Here's the expectation of life chart, divided into half decades. You can see the data is broken out very broadly by ethnic identification and by sex. Along the left, we have the age and the values given are the years you can expect statistically to live beyond your current age. At birth, the general population can expect 77.7 years of life, higher for people who identify as white and for females. Now we slide down the chart a bit, and we find that at age 20, the general population who survived to college age can expect to live to 78.6 years, not quite an extra year of life. As we continue down the chart, we see that by age 30, your life expectancy has increased to 79.2, possibly as a result of deaths in the young and reckless phase of adult life, especially car accidents. And if you make it to age 45, your life expectancy hits 80 years for the first time. If you survive all the way to 70, on the other side of the first heart attack phase of life, you can expect to make it to 84. Sadly, the disparity between those who identify as white and those who identify as black is most dramatic between birth and their first year, and then again in their 40s when the chronic diseases of middle age begin to take their toll. So if you switch to veganism in your late 20s or 30s, you will certainly outlive the other babies born at the same time as you. But this is not necessarily by virtue of your diet and lifestyle, but rather as a result of having survived your infancy and childhood, where some of your cohorts did not. This could be true of any decision that people make in their adult lives. We should also include here the ethnicity disparity. If your practice, product, or lifestyle has a strong bias among a particular ethnic group, you move from the general population data to one of the subcategories. This changes the data as well, no longer apples to apples comparison. Most of you out there watching are self-identified as white or European ancestry, and so we have another bias effect. Likewise, we could stratify this data on income level, education or regional variation, rural versus urban, nationality, occupation, and even on what kind of vehicle you drive. Some of you live in Northern Europe or Australia or other regions with slightly higher life expectancies than the U.S., and almost all of you come from regions above the global average or global median values. Infant mortality is a big part of this global disparity, as is AIDS death in Southern Africa, and of course access to immediate medical care in emergencies. Longevity turns out to be a very tough nut to crack, statistically. Anytime a behavior or group is linked to other risk behaviors. For example, vegans in the U.S. are much more likely to identify as white or Indian, as well as wealthy and urban, and as such they have very different expectancy of life profiles. Actual research on life expectancy is always carefully stratified, and the comparisons are always done on assumptions of multiple associations. Irresponsible use of this data is often abused to tout some lifestyle, product, or religion. So if someone tells you that vegans or fruitetarians or sun worshipers or badminton players or wheatgrass drinkers or people who own a Ferrari live longer than the national average, I hope you will laugh in their face, because you see your gray hairs will be longer than theirs, since you are one of the inner circle, a power elite, a wise minister of all things, a sophisticated intellectual, and initiate to the secrets of the universe. You are a subscriber to Convordance. Thanks for watching. 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