Any presidential candidate asking for our vote might rightly be asked in return, "Will you live long enough to serve out your term?"
This question has never been more relevant than in the case of Senator John McCain, who, if successful, will be oldest candidate we've ever elected president -- 2 years and 165 days older than Ronald Reagan was at the time of his inauguration. And then of course there's the well-publicized matter of McCain's malignant melanoma, the status of which he's keeping, well, decidedly unpublicized. He promised us he'd release his health records in April. It's now May.
Putting that aside for a moment, we decided to calculate McCain's life expectancy to see if, given his habits and age, we can expect him to last until 2016. While we were at it, we thought it only fair to apply the same scrutiny to Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton.
For our calculations we used the Vitality Compass, an online tool developed jointly by Bluezones.com and the University of Minnesota school of Public Health. It uses CDC Life Tables and the meta analysis of more that 335 epidemiology studies to calculate how different lifestyle factors estimate life expectancy and Biological Age. Then, we dug into the available reporting on each of the candidates and ran them through the Compass. For variables we couldn't answer (e.g. do you take sleep medications?) we plugged in the same variable for each candidate so as to put them all on a level playing field.
We found that all candidates are above average in life expectancy. They all benefit by being rich (making over $150K/yr), well educated, married, super-engaged in their work, somewhat active physically and engaged socially and religiously. Here's how they break out:
Hillary Clinton
Life Expectancy: 95.1
Biological Age: 58.2
Clinton has above average life expectancy. She gets big points for being engaged in her work, being physically active, and having a moderate drinking (beer) habit, in addition to the fact she has never smoked. We docked her slightly as she's not much of a churchgoer. Her well documented less-than-optimal relationship with Bill (thanks Monica) and her weight cost her too.
Barack Obama
Life Expectancy: 93.9
Biological Age: 36.4
Obama is the healthiest of all candidates given his age and ethnicity. He's given big points for his higher level of physical activity (we have reports of intense basketball playing and playing with his children in St. Thomas), his religious involvement and his stable marriage. He is a moderate drinker (had a beer just the other night in Philly). Because of his African father, he belongs to a population of people that has a slightly lower life expectancy so our Compass registered that. He also lost points for his previous smoking habit.
John McCain
Life expectancy: 87.9
Biological Age: 64.6
McCain's life expectancy is -- surprise, surprise -- the lowest of all candidates for several reasons: lack of knee cartilage precludes too much rigorous activity and his anger issues (which are well-documented). The anger issue is probably costing him a half dozen years of life expectancy. He does get extra years for his well-documented record of church attendance, a practice strongly correlated with better health habits.
But skin cancer is still the wild card for McCain. Can he make through eight years in the White House? In 2000, he was diagnosed with Stage IIA melanoma and had the cancerous tissue removed from the side of his head. That was eight years ago. A third of all Stage IIA melanoma victims die within 10 years.
Dan Buetter is the Author of the New York Times Best-selling book The Blue Zones: What the World's Longest-lived People Teach us about Living Longer. The Vitality Compass is available at www.bluezones.com.