Move to a big city and live longer?

That's one conclusion you can come to from a study of mortality by the Washington Post. The study points out that mortality rates were most likely to decline in the Northeast corridor and in large cities that anchor metropolitan areas of more than a million people, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis and Houston. 

And for some reason women are not living as long when compared to men as they used to. In the 20th century, the average white American woman lived eight years longer than the average white American man. Today, that health advantage has narrowed to just five years.

Another anomaly: From 1990 through 2014, the mortality rate for white women rose in most parts of the country, particularly around small cities and in rural areas. Rates often went up by more than 40 percent and, in some places, doubled. Women in their late 40s were especially hurt. In 2000 for every 100,000 women in their late 40s, 228 died. Today, 296 are dying. Since 1990 death rates for rural white women in midlife have risen by nearly 50 percent. In the hardest-hit places — 21 counties arrayed across the South and Midwest — the death rate has doubled, or worse, since the turn of the century for white women in midlife.

The experts think the increasing mortality rates have come about because the women are far more likely than their grandmothers to be smokers, suffer from obesity or drink themselves to death. We are among the heaviest people in the world; more than a third of adults in the United States are considered obese. The average American woman today weighs as much as an American man did in the early 1960s.