Tag Archives: smoking

“Distinctive behaviors of the actively religious” across countries

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Pew analyzed international data and found that individuals who are actively religious have different behaviors than others in their nation in a number of countries:

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It appears that religiosity affects certain areas more consistently – particularly smoking, voting, happiness, and participation in nonreligious organizations – than others even as these relationships between religiosity and health, well-being, and prosocial behaviors can differ across countries. Of course, why some of these relationships and not others exist, even in the same categories like the example that the more religious do not smoke but religiosity has no impact on obesity or exercise, gets more complicated…

Smoking as a marker of social class

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Recent data shows who in America is smoking and who is not:

Among the nation’s less-educated people — those with a high-school-equivalency diploma — the smoking rate remains more than 40 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, rural residents are diagnosed with lung cancer at rates 18 to 20 percent above those of city dwellers. By nearly every statistical measure, researchers say, America’s lower class now smokes more and dies more from cigarettes than other Americans.

 

This widening gap between classes carries huge health implications and is already reshaping the country’s battle over tobacco control. Cigarette companies are focusing their marketing on lower socioeconomic communities to retain their customer base, researchers say. Nonprofit and advocacy groups are retooling their programs for the complex and more difficult work of reaching and treating marginalized groups…

When smoking first gained popularity in the early 20th century, it was a habit of the rich, a token of luxury dusted with Hollywood glamour. Then came the 1964 surgeon general’s report on its deadly effects, and during the next 3½ decades, smoking among the nation’s highest-income families plummeted by 62 percent. But among families of the lowest income, it decreased by just 9 percent.

It is remarkable how little one encounters smoking in wealthier communities compared to less well off places. Would smoking be one of the single best lifestyle indicators of someone who has less education? Imagine a game where you had to guess someone’s education/social class based on observing their normal behavior in public.

Thinking more broadly, perhaps the newest major marker of having more education and a higher social class is good health and the lifestyle associated with it, everything from gym membership to regular jogging to eating patterns to having intense outdoor sports/hobbies. It is not just smoking; these class differences go across a variety of conditions and behaviors.

More than ten year gap in life span among rich and poor

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New data shows that the difference in life spans between richer and poorer Americans continues to grow:

The poor are losing ground not only in income, but also in years of life, the most basic measure of well-being. In the early 1970s, a 60-year-old man in the top half of the earnings ladder could expect to live 1.2 years longer than a man of the same age in the bottom half, according to an analysis by the Social Security Administration. Fast-forward to 2001, and he could expect to live 5.8 years longer than his poorer counterpart.

New research released on Friday contains even more jarring numbers. Looking at the extreme ends of the income spectrum, economists at the Brookings Institution found that for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950, that difference had more than doubled, to 14 years.

For women, the gap grew to 13 years, from 4.7 years…

It is hard to point to one overriding cause, but public health researchers have a few answers. In recent decades, smoking, the single biggest cause of preventable death, has helped drive the disparity, said Andrew Fenelon, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the rich and educated began to drop the habit, its deadly effects fell increasingly on poorer, uneducated people. Mr. Fenelon has calculated that smoking accounted for a third to a fifth of the gap in life expectancy between men with college degrees and men with only high school degrees. For women it was as much as a quarter.

In the set of the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, you can’t have as much of the second and third if the first is not the same. While we often discuss inequality of opportunities or outcomes, we spend less time focusing on the body though commentators like Ta-Nehisi Coates have recently drawn more attention to the role of bodies in racial differences.

The article does suggest that evidence shows access to healthcare is not a big driver of this gap.