There’s a theory that longevity is lower in men because they need to be stronger in order to survive in a conflict. It’s a trade off. Physical strength is the result of growth, but some of the same pathways for increased growth are also theorized to be the root cause of aging. Note that this is independent of strength training; it’s the ability to get stronger, rather than actually getting stronger (among other related characteristics), that may affect longevity. Your intuition that accidental death and smoking do not explain the entirety of the gender gap in longevity is spot on. It’s not all bad news for men though. If you manage to avoid obesity and diabetes, your increased strength and bone density may impart greater quality of life in old age, and that may be worth the 3 lost years at the end of life. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3034172/
The big killer among modern elderly people is the massive muscle wasting that accompanies most inpatient hospital procedures. Having a solid foundation of muscle can insulate a person from the dreaded point of no return after which it would be impossible to build one's body back after a procedure.
Even without being bedridden for days after an inpatient procedure, we have an epidemic of frailty among elderly people. This commonly causes serious falls and fractures, and after an incident like that most people fall into a rapid downward spiral. As a matter of public health policy we should be prescribing weight training and higher protein diets for elderly people.
Scientists are finding that aging is a discrete disease that catalyzes other secondary diseases, like cancer and dementia. They are also finding that it is highly likely that men’s cellular aging is slightly accelerated compared to women, albeit with the trade off described above. The anti-inflammatory benefits of muscle are overwhelmed by the avalanche of diseases caused by aging. If you’re 80 years old and you use drugs to stave off one disease, you’re likely to die from another disease soon thereafter. It’s like playing wack-a-mole, because we’re not addressing the primary disease: aging. That may change soon since more research is being done into aging as a disease.
