Healthy lives

Malta has surprised researchers who studied the healthy lives of European citizens, from Bloomberg:

While Italian men and French women may live to be the oldest in Europe, a true dolce vita free of disability belongs to the Danes, U.K. researchers found. Women in Denmark, which has as many bikes as it has citizens, can expect 74.1 years of good health on average, while men may get about six months less, said scientists led by Carol Jagger, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Leicester. The study, published in The Lancet, compared how many more healthy years 50-year-old people may expect to have in 25 European Union countries.

"What we've never had is a truly comparable measure across the different European countries,'' Jagger said...The study shows that most of Europe's new member states lag behind in terms of healthy years, Jagger said in an interview. The scientists will continue their research to see why the gap exists and whether it is narrowing..

The researchers said one surprise was Malta, the tiny Mediterranean island country with a gross national income per capita of $15,310, less than a third that of Denmark. Men and women in Malta can expect the second-longest healthy lives in Europe. "They're sort of the outlier of the new countries,'' Jagger said. "A big question is their Mediterranean diet. I think it flags up a lot of questions to start looking at.''