Healthier school lunches, lifelong activity and a healthcare system built around prevention helped South Korea add 7.94 years to its life expectancy between 2000 and 2021, while American longevity slid down global rankings over the same stretch.
In her new CNN Original Series "Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever," veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher went hunting for the science behind the global longevity boom. One of her sharpest stops was South Korea, where everyday habits, not expensive biotech, appear to be driving some of the world's biggest gains in lifespan.Americans once sat near the developed-world average on life expectancy, but they no longer do. U.S. life expectancy reached 79.0 years in 2024, but the average across comparable wealthy countries was 82.7, a gap of about 3.7 years, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's Health at a Glance 2025 report places the U.S. behind every major peer including Japan, Switzerland and South Korea, all of which crossed the 80-year threshold years ago.The clearest contrast starts in the cafeteria. When Swisher visited a Seoul school at lunchtime, students were eating lettuce wraps, radish-and-chive salad, kimchi and seasonal fruit, not the kind of meal her own young children would willingly choose, she told CNN.Korean children are given free school lunches throughout their schooling, and the menus are deliberately designed for both nutrition and education, school nutritionist Yeonju Kim said in the documentary.The U.S. picture is starkly different. A 2023 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found nearly half of children aged 1 to 5 do not eat a vegetable every day, and a third do not eat fruit daily.The problem follows children into adulthood. A 2025 study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, drawing on more than 31,000 American adults in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, found 47% had poor-quality diets, measured against the American Heart Association's primary diet score, which rewards plates heavy on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins and healthy fats while penalizing processed foods.Diets that hit those marks, including the Mediterranean and MIND eating patterns, are linked to both longer life and slower cognitive decline. MIND stands for the Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay. The benefits are barely noticeable day to day but compound dramatically over decades.Activity is the second pillar. In studies of South Korean "SuperAgers," older adults whose cognitive performance matches that of people decades younger, the most influential factors are regular exercise, strong social ties and taking on new, challenging activities, said Dr. Geon-Ha Kim, a neuroscientist at Ewha Womans University Medical Center in Seoul.For a more personal lesson, Swisher sat down with Park Mak-rye, the 79-year-old social media star better known as "Korea Grandma," who posts cooking recipes, skin-care routines and exercise videos to a large online following. Those habits, plus a tight circle of friends, are what keep her going, she said.
