Comment by sjducb
20 days ago
The confounding variable is probably wealth. Being rich is very important for longevity. The effect size for wealth is likely bigger than the effect size for strength training. So construction workers age badly because they are poor, despite all the strength training.
Not being rich per se, but probably stress. The body has no innate knowledge of how wealthy you are, outside of some information stored in the neocortex about financial details (which has little influence on the overall functioning and regulation of the organism as a whole). But it does keep track of a very important signal, and that is neuroception, or safety, absence of threats. And being wealthy, absence of sources of stress, or ability to avoid them, brings about that state of feeling secure, safe, which affects every cell of the body and leads to a good regulation of the whole organism.
Your body does keep track of your place in the social hierarchy with hormones like Vasopressin, Oxytocin, Testosterone and Estrogen. Social hierarchies are biology not culture. You can tell it's biology because all social animals have social hierarchies.
However, this is a very complicated and poorly understood field. Current research struggles with a chicken and egg problem. Does high testosterone cause high status, or do high status men produce more testosterone? The answer seems to be both simultaneously.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/tre.372?msoc...
Your scientific study does not support your claim (body keeps track of social status) and the other is a men's health magazine article. Hardly the cutting edge of science
Wealth per se has nothing to do with longevity, as a minute's thought will make plain. What wealth does do is enable certain things that help with longevity, such as better medical care. If you're using wealth as a measure, you need to realize that it's only a proxy, and you'll get better data by looking at the actual behaviors that it's a proxy for.
Basically a good point. Merely never ending up in situations where it's a struggle to make ends meet has a huge impact on stress though. You often don't even have to use the wealth in order to benefit with respect to stress.
Such a strange comment. Wealth has nothing to do with longevity and yet here's all the ways how wealth CAUSES longevity.
>Wealth per se
For example, if you have $10m but never go to the doctor, you won't benefit from the medical care discrepancy between wealthy and poor
5 replies →
> such as better medical care
Better food, comes first
Thing is, better food is available to the poor as well, you just have to be willing to put in the work for it. Buy vegetables and make salads instead of spending the same amount of money at McDonald's, for example. The price of fresh vegetables at Walmart has never been out of reach even for someone working 40 hours for minimum wage. Housing might be ridiculously expensive, and medical care if you don't have insurance? Good luck. But basic vegetables? Rice and beans? (Which make for a complete set of amino acids, BTW: there's a reason rice and beans is such a popular dish in Central America). Those have stayed affordable even when the price of other things has gone up.
Now, I'll grant that there are plenty of poor people who are drinking soda and eating junk food. Not going to deny that. But I have always been able to go to Walmart and buy lettuce and tomatoes for my salads, and I've never seen the price of those basics skyrocket like the price of eggs (at one point) or meat have. So the poor people who are drinking soda instead of water, and eating chips instead of salads? They're choosing those foods, not being forced into them by poverty.
There are plenty of areas where rich people have a big advantage over poor people in terms of access to things that provide longevity. But food, at least in America (the only country whose food prices I'm familiar enough with to talk intelligently about), just isn't one of them.
Now, you could argue that poor people didn't grow up with parents who taught them how to cook healthy food on a tight budget. Yes, that's true for many (not all) of the poor (again, at least in America, I don't know enough about other countries here). But there, it's not being poor that's keeping them from eating healthy, it's not being taught. Money isn't the limiting factor there.