Good Question: Why do men have a lower life expectancy?

A couple of points stand out to Dr. David Hilden, Chair of the Department of Medicine for Hennepin Healthcare.

“For over 100 years, for pretty much the entirety of the 20th century, men have not lived as long as women primarily because of heart disease and cancer,” he said, adding that men get heart disease on average earlier than women, as well as die from it earlier. “The second (leading cause) would be lung cancer, and it’s almost exclusively because men smoked more for most of the last century.”