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

Let me suggest this way of looking at it: all scientific principles are ‘ceteris paribus’ principles, that is, it’s an “all other things being equal” situation. That’s why when you design an experiment you try to eliminate as many variables as possible, so that you know what “other things” are affecting your testing. Medicine presents a unique problem in that the kind of testing that would enable us to control some variables are unethical and inhumane. As a result, we can’t eliminate all the variables. So it’s quite likely we will never completely understand most causes of death until after the person is dead. The only way to truly understand them is to mistreat living people with the condition.