Lane Koeslin wrote:
> >>The annual death rate of vegetarian women is .86
> percent; the annual death rate of non-vegetarian women is .54 percent.
>
> Does this really mean anything?  I've never been a vegetarian or
> anything, eat mostly meat -- so the above sounds great to me. <G>
> But, lets just say vegetarian women do somehow live longer than
> meat-eating women (this is hypothetical, folks) then the fact that
> more of them died every year doesn't mean a thing -- there would
> simply be more, say -- 90 to 100 year olds amongst them.  Maybe
> I'm too simplistic to understand statistics like this.
> Enlighten me, please.

I was nonplussed by this figures as well. I came to think of it this
way. Suppose you have a population of 100,000 people of various ages,
and suppose that their average lifespan is 10 years. In any given year,
what percentage of those people would you expect to die? Clearly, the
percentage will be quite high. Now suppose that you have the same sort
of population, but their average lifespan is 75 years. Over the next,
say, 150 years, the same number of people will still die (100,000): the
death rate will always be one per person. But the deaths are a lot less
"concentrated" in time, more spread out. Thus, the percentage of the
population dying in any given year will be much smaller than for the
population that lives only 10 years.

In other words, I think we can think of the figures as a once-removed
indicator of average lifespan.