That's the news from a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers can't account for the disparity.

We can.

Not that our opinion is scientific, you understand.

But just off the top of our pointed heads, we have a few theories about why older white Americans suffer more ravages from diabetes, heart disease, strokes, hypertension, lung disease and cancer than our British cousins.

For openers, Americans work too hard. No one in the industrial world works longer hours than Americans. The Japanese used to, but not any more. The Germans and Brits aren't even in our league.

Second, Americans don't have much of a social safety net. If you lose your job, you lose your health insurance. If you're a Brit, you don't. So in addition to the stress of working too hard, Americans also worry about what will happen to them and their families if they get canned or outsourced.

Third, our highly processed food is killing us. Too much high fructose corn syrup, too much salt, too much hydrogenated fat. The Brits are infamous for their miserable food, but it can't be worse than America's, at least in terms of its health effects.

The Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department won't even require Big Food to tell us on the label what we're eating. If a beef processor wants to test all its meat for mad-cow disease, the government takes action - against the meat processor. Really.

Fourth, too many of our health-care dollars are spent on fat cats, that is, insurance company executives, hospital administrators, doctors with exotic specialties and trial lawyers. They all command huge salaries and bureaucracies that gobble up funds arguing over who won't pay the bill.

But at least we Americans have been spared the horrors of socialized medicine, by golly. The fact that the American system doesn't work seems beside the point, at least to most policymakers and politicians.

By the way, lest you guess that Americans are sicker because the U.S. doesn't take good care of racial minorities, consider that this study examined only whites. And Americans were sicker than Brits across the income spectrum, from poor to rich.

Now get back to work.