[ifwinterco]

The crazy thing is this is with Americans being generally extremely puritanical when it comes to alcohol and tobacco by European standards.

What on earth are they doing over there that's so crazily unhealthy you can have no fun and still only live as long as a beer swilling chain smoking European working class person?

[Herring]

You're European? You guys shipped over all your individualist (aka antisocial) people to the US. They have no idea how to work together to build a society, can't trust each other, so all they do is hustle and pray that having money will insulate them from each other. Doesn't work.

[ifwinterco]

I'm British so we are in a strange place where it comes to this stuff.

The shared language means we're totally submerged in US culture in a lot of ways, but equally we're quite distinctly European in others.

That cognitive dissonance explains a lot about the modern UK I think

[buckle8017]

Traveling vastly larger distances by automobile.

That's the difference.

[ifwinterco]

Yep combined with eating a lot - being puritanical about all other vices won't help you much if you eat 5000 kcal/day and don't walk anywhere