According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the population in the American continent has won 16 years of life in average in the last 45 years; today, life expectancy in this region is of 75 years.

BBC launched a calculator that shows a person’s life expectancy based on the country you were born in, and using this tool and analyzing the results for Latin America, Costa Rica is in the first place, which means, it is the country with highest life expectancy in the region; globally it takes position 14 with 80.98 years according to the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016 generated by the WHO.

The higher life expectancy in Costa Rica is associated with several elements, including security, health and education.

A study published by The Lancet Global Health in 2015 has Costa Rica ranked in position 26 among 187 countries when it comes to the number of healthy foods that are included in the diet.

High coverage of health and social security and adequate sanitary conditions are also part of the reason Costa Rica takes this privileged spot.

Costa Rica faces, however, challenges such as obesity in adults and nutritional deficiencies in children. The increasing costs of health attention are also a concern.

The second country to appear in the ranking is Chile, followed by Peru.

In Latin America the country with lowest life expectancy is Haiti with 63.97 years, followed by Belize and Honduras.

In the world, Japan holds the first position in highest life expectancy, reaching 83.94 years, in second place Singapore and third Switzerland.

In general women live longer than men in every country, and the biggest difference is marked in Venezuela where women live in average 79 years while men 71.