Health is Wealth

We all are familiar with the cliché, “Health is Wealth”. It just happens that this statement is fairly accurate and has been supported by a study done by unnaturalcauses.org. We were talking about the Social Determinants of Health at my Foundations in Health class and I just learned that there is a direct relationship between health and one’s socio-economic background. The documentary that we watched proposed that the higher your income is the healthier you are as compared to those with lesser incomes. What surprises me the most is that the reason why this phenomenon is occurring is not because the wealthier people can afford better health care (because in Canada everyone has equal access to health care) but because wealthier people has actually more control over their work and basically with their lives.

Let’s take for example the CEO of a company and a regular employee. The CEO can come to work anytime he wants, he doesn’t have to report to anyone, and he can basically write down his personal to do list without having to think about work or anything else interfering with his plans. The regular employees on the other hand have a lot of stress and face tremendous pressure in their job. They don’t have much control over their job and if they aren’t being paid enough, they have to worry about making their budget fit or if they will have a job the next day with the recession.

Having power to control one’s environment has huge impact on one’s health. But again, income isn’t the only main factor as race and culture will also play a huge part. It is said that if you belong to a minority, even if you have a very big income you will have a lesser level of health as compared to a Caucasian.

So if you want to be healthy, then be a rich white guy/girl. And as my teacher adds, if you are poor don’t be poor too long. It’s funny but this holds some truth in it.