why do people who smoke and drink heavily sometimes outlive heathy people?

Question

So people who exercise, eat healthy and never touch drugs or excess of any kind and do all they can to stay fit only to die so soon into their lives?

But then you have people who drink, smoke and do drugs in massive amounts for ages but they last for a long time all things considered and sometimes way older then other average people

This isn’t the case for all of them but it happens enough to be noticed

So how and why does this happen?

Thanks for reading and have a nice day

In: Other

Answer 1

Chance. Things that are *risk factors* (ie increase your chances of something bad) are generally not 100% guarantees.

Imagine two people rolling a die with 10,000 sides. The healthy person dies if they roll a 1, the smoker and drinker dies if they roll from 1 to 100. Now roll every day for the rest of their lives.

Eventually the unhealthy person is way more likely to hit their bad numbers, but that doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed to, and the healthy person could still hit that 1 while the smoker never rolls under a 250 a single day in their life.

Now if you have a large group of each kind of person, like *the population*, then you *will* get the smokers rolling into their bad numbers 100 times more than the non smokers *on average*, so with a large enough group of people you *will* see that trend emerge.

But for any *individual* person, they might just never roll it in their lives.