Your Community Determines Your Well Being

One of the most important decisions you can make is who you spend your time with. You choose your friends, your significant other and who you spend your time with. Those choices can largely affect how healthy you’ll be. Don’t believe that community can affect your health?

Check out this fascinating story cited in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell where he described the town of Roseto, PA and its inhabitants:

For men over sixty-five, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole.

…There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That’s it.

After eliminating diet, exercise and genetics, Wolf (the researcher) began to realize the secret of Roseto was the town itself:

As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why. They looked at how Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people.

Recently, we’ve had to consider what is best for an older family member and my mantra has always been that, in general and especially as people age, they are best kept somewhere that they have a community and a purpose.

The only people who have gotten better (and not worse) in retirement homes are those who did not have a community and found one in the retirement home. That happens occasionally, but is the exception to the rule. More often than not people in retirement homes lose their community and their purpose. Their health is soon lost as well.

It is better therefore that two should be together, than one: for they have the advantage of their society.
-Ecclesiastes 4:9