Spain Tops List of World's Healthiest Countries

The lat­est find­ings from Bloomberg have ranked Spain as the health­i­est coun­try in the world, largely due to the coun­try’s ten­dency to con­sume a Mediterranean diet with extra vir­gin olive oil and nuts.

The 2019 Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index ranked 169 World Health Organization states for their over­all health based on data from the World Health Organization, the United Nations Population Division and the World Bank.

Data was ana­lyzed in the con­text of health vari­ables, such as behav­ior, envi­ron­ment and life expectancy as well as risk fac­tors, such as obe­sity, high blood pres­sure and tobacco use.

Spain jumped five places to beat out Italy, for­merly the health­i­est nation accord­ing to the 2017 Bloomberg study. Spain scored an over­all health grade of 92.8 out of 100. Other top 10 coun­tries were Iceland, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, Singapore, Norway and Israel.

Researchers hypoth­e­sized that the excep­tional health of Spain’s cit­i­zens was largely due to their eat­ing habits. Like Italy, Spain’s adher­ence to the Mediterranean diet, with a focus on extra vir­gin olive oil and nuts, has been shown to be health­ier than a low-fat diet in pro­tect­ing against major car­dio­vas­cu­lar events.

Bloomberg sug­gested this might be one rea­son coun­tries with a low-fat diet, such as Japan, did not score quite as high. The Mediterranean diet has also been linked to healthy brain aging, lower risk of depres­sion, lower risk of stroke in women, a lower risk of obe­sity and a host of other ben­e­fits.

Spain also earned praise for its pub­lic health sys­tem, notably its empha­sis on pre­ven­ta­tive care for chil­dren, women and elderly patients. According to the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, the Mediterranean coun­try has seen a decline in car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases and deaths from can­cer over the last decade.

According to U.N. data, Spain enjoys the high­est life expectancy in the E.U. and the third high­est glob­ally, behind Japan and Switzerland. By 2040, it is pre­dicted that the aver­age per­son born in Spain will have a life expectancy of almost 86 years at birth, which would be the high­est in the world.

Canada and the United States came in six­teenth and thirty-fifth in the 2019 Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index, respec­tively. Meanwhile, Cuba ranked thir­ti­eth, mak­ing it the high­est-rank­ing nation that is not con­sid­ered a ​“high income” coun­try by the World Bank.

China came in fifty-sec­ond and the Asian coun­try is expected to enjoy a higher life expectancy than the United States by the year 2040. Sub-Saharan nations rep­re­sented 27 of the 30 least healthy nations in the Bloomberg study, along with Haiti, Afghanistan and Yemen.

• Bloomberg


• The New England Journal of Medicine


• European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies