The average American will die as many as two years sooner than if they lived in Western Europe or Japan. This can be attributed, in part, to three of the darker elements of life in the US: gun violence, drug overdoses and the country's road death toll.

More than 100,000 people in the US lose their lives as a result of these causes every year. For each of the categories, the death rate is far higher in America than in other wealthy countries, according to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The disparity is evident in comparisons with each of the 12 developed countries that have comparable mortality data available. These include Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.