Last Updated: June 21, 2018

In the end, everyone dies.

But how you die varies greatly by age, gender, your genetic code, and a host of other factors. Recently, researchers at Opportunity Health Center mined 23 years of data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) to explore exactly how Canadians die differently than everyone else in the world.

Thanks to good health care, access to nutritional foods, and peaceful lives, Canadians benefit from longer lifespans than most. Those longer life spans, however, often lead to different causes of deaths. Instead of suffering from violence or diseases of poverty, Canadians die much more frequently from diseases of affluence, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

The first chart below highlights the differences between the top causes of Canadian deaths compared to world averages.