Listen up, guys: If you want a long life, marry a well-educated woman.
That’s what Swedish researchers say. In fact, as a factor in a man’s risk of dying, a woman’s schooling matters more than his own.
“Women traditionally take more responsibility for the home than men do, and, as a consequence, women’s education might be more important for the family’s lifestyle, for example, in terms of food habits, than men’s education,” researchers Robert Erikson and Jenny Torssander of Stockholm’s Swedish Institute for Social Research wrote in the October Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (JECH).
“We can assume that more highly educated women have better possibilities to find the important health messages that are around ... There are lots of health messages in the media and I think some of them are important and some are just misleading,” they said.
The pair’s study examined 1990 census data of more than 1.5 million employed men and women, ages 30 to 59, along with cause of death data for 1991–2003.
The findings: Men living with a woman without any high school education were 1.25 times more likely to die than men living with a college graduate.