107 - 7 Insights From Spain That Can Help Independent Physicians Live (And Work) Longer

Did you know Spain ranks higher than the U.S. in life expectancy — even though 20% of their population smokes?

In this week’s curiosity episode, we’re digging into why Spain is sitting pretty at #9 in global life expectancy. If you're a younger physician trying to build a better, less stressful life outside of corporate medicine, these insights aren’t just interesting — they’re clues. We're talking diet, disease, divorce rates, smoking, suicide, and more. Spoiler: it's not all about high-tech healthcare.

• See how smaller portion sizes and mid-day meals may be helping Spaniards live longer.
• Find out how many doctors they have per capita — and how it compares to us in the U.S.
• Learn what the top 5 causes of death in Spain can tell us about inflammation, lifestyle, and stress.

Press play and stay curious — because understanding why Spain lives longer might just help you live (and practice) better.

Discover how medical graduates, junior doctors, and young physicians can navigate residency training programs, surgical residency, and locum tenens to increase income, enjoy independent practice, decrease stress, achieve financial freedom, and retire early, while maintaining patient satisfaction and exploring physician side gigs to tackle medical school loans.

Transcript

Coach JPMD (00:00.194)
By the end of this episode, you're hopefully going to know a little bit more about Spain that you did not know before. Welcome back to another episode where I help younger physicians decrease stress and increase income by transitioning from corporate to independent practices, even without any business experience. In this episode, you're going to learn a couple of things about Spain that you may have not known before today. And that is of course, their divorce rate, mortality statistics on top five diseases and how much they smoke. Welcome to another episode of the independent physicians blueprint with your host coach JPMD. That's me. And we are continuing our curiosity episode series with Spain. 

Today we're going to talk about Spain who ranks number nine in the world in terms of life expectancy and they live longer than we do in the U S. So let's dive in to some of the details of this country. Now we have much more details, much more detail like, yeah, we have more details this week on Spain than we did with reunion. Reunion is ranks, ranks number 10 in the world, small island off the coast of Madagascar. And really didn't have much information on them. But you know, some of the information that we're gathering through this series will hopefully give us some insight at the end where we can compare some of the numbers and compare some of the stats. And that's what I hope to do at the end of this episode series on longevity. So, hope you guys are with us, staying with us and, remaining curious as to why, why Spain ranks number ninth in the world in terms of life expectancy. So their life expectancy is about 84 years. so, females live, or women live to 86.6 on average, males live 81.3 and that's just a common theme worldwide where women live longer than men. Predominant religion is Christianity at 59 % of the population and non-denominational religion as per one of our websites that I looked at was about 37%. Location, where's Spain?

Coach JPMD (02:18.904)
Well, I hope everyone knows where Spain is, but just for those who are listening and don't have a map or don't have Google and maybe living in the jungle, we have Spain as a bordering France on the south side of France and Portugal. So it's almost an island. If it wasn't connected to Spain, I guess it'd be an island because just south of Spain is Africa and Morocco.

I think Morocco is a long life also. So it may be related to the region. And I think that Spain is one of the countries that lives the longest in Europe. So there's something that the Spanish are doing, making them live longer. And so we'll dive into some of the details.

Coach JPMD (03:09.966)
So one of the things I was interested in finding out is whether or not they had a lot more physicians than we do in the United States, and they sure do. So they have 4.48 physicians per 1,000 of their population, whereas the US has 3.61 per 1,000. What are their diseases? What are the Spanish dying of? So Spanish people.

Coach JPMD (03:44.814)
I thought I had this right in front of me here. So, so top causes of death, 100 per 100,000 of their population. Now this is in 2021. Don't have, um, at least I didn't see the more recent data, but we'll go with this. And, um, you know, why I'm a little concerned about this data because, uh, the ischemic heart disease was number one, uh, was top leading cause of death followed by COVID-19. And that's kind of expected in 2021 followed by Alzheimer's disease.

stroke, and tracheal bronchial or tracheal bronchus lung cancer. So up respiratory cancers are the is a fifth leading cause of death in Spain. And what I find interesting is that these diseases if you look if you look deep are really inflammatory diseases.

Right? Even COVID, you could say that COVID was an inflammatory disease. If you're dying of COVID, you overwhelmed by the response that your body had towards COVID, which became more of an inflammatory pulmonary disease. systemic disease. So that's the top five cause of death. Food. What do they eat? Well, one of the articles I read was that Spanish

eat their largest meal during lunch, which I don't think is the case for us in the US. I love this restaurant that we have right down the street from us called Sepas. And they're a Spanish cuisine restaurant and their portion sizes are much smaller. And it's very interesting because when you go to some of our American restaurants, our portion sizes are big that they have to, we have to take food home. So

portion sizes are probably much smaller. They probably are eating more of a Mediterranean diet. That's something I did read also with a lot of vegetables and olive oils, olives. And, you know, I'd love to hear if there are any Spanish listeners out there. If you can text me, text me. If you look at the show notes and there's a link that allows you to text me. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on diet in Spain and how it compares to the US.

Coach JPMD (06:04.48)
Cigarette smoke. That's another thing I found interesting was that they, they smoke 20 % of their population smokes or should I say that differently? I think I should say that differently because I don't know if it's 20 % of the population that smokes. So maybe I should clarify that because, you know, on this website that I have here from world data.info, it shows that 20 % smoke in Spain and it's not showing per capita or

So 20 % versus 9%. And I'll have to dig deeper in that number. So maybe I'll compare that to other countries and see if there's a difference. But it looks like Spanish people smoke more than the US.

More than Americans. Another stat I found interesting was the divorce rate where Spain as divorce rate is amongst one of the lowest I've seen at 1.8 per thousand. Whereas the U S divorce rate was 2.3 per thousand. So that was a difference. And one other pretty daunting statistic that I found on this website, actually from the world health organization. So in Spain, the suicide rate

was 8.1 per 100,000 population. And in the US was 15.1. So there, I think is something that we can delve deeper into when we do our analysis near the end of this, or at the end of this series. Because this also speaks to our physician population as well. So I've talked about that in previous episodes. So are we not as happy? Are we are we prideful?

Because there, there is a there's a linkage between pride and suicide rates, from what I've read in the past. So something to consider is, why are we almost twice as much or twice as likely to commit suicide in the US. And of course, that is probably driving some of our mortality and life expectancy data as well. And so one final thing I saw, and I read

Coach JPMD (08:16.704)
online was that the trend in Spanish mortality and life expectancy is actually looking really good. And they're they're set to outpace Japan in terms of global life life expectancy. So so I'm not sure what's going on in Spain, definitely might want to take a look myself, maybe go out there and see how they live and see how what they eat and see how we can emulate that in the US. So that's the curiosity episode for this week.

Spain ranks number ninth in the world. And so next week we're going to discuss Singapore. Singapore is number eight. And so we'll kind of lay out some of these statistics similar to what I did with this episode, since we do have a little bit more information and I believe we probably will have more information on Singapore as well. So tune in next week for another longevity series episode.

curiosity episode series, I should say. And like I said before, if there is any questions or if you have any thoughts on Spain, any insights on Spain, I would love to hear your thoughts. So send me a text link in the show notes. It's the first line of the show notes. It links right to your text app and love to hear what you think about this episode and the series. And we'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast.

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