For Health, It's Important to Be Important

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. That proverbial advice has always been presumed to mean that good health habits, such as eating an apple, help assure good health. Now scientific study suggests that whom you eat the apple with -- and not just the apple itself -- may be what makes the difference. An intriguing body of research, reported in Mondays New York Times, indicates that social status may be an additional factor in assuring good health and longevity. Medical researchers are not sure what exactly accounts for the better health of people in higher socioeconomic classes, but the research suggests that the phenomenon may be due to something beyond the circular fact that people in higher classes tend to have better health habits -- such as not smoking -- than those in lower classes. Researchers believe that one key factor responsible for the observed differences may be the lower stress -- and lesser accompanying vulnerability to disease -- encountered by those on the higher rungs of the social ladder.

"This research is interesting," says TIME medical columnist Christine Gorman, "but it needs some refinement." Stress is something that's hard to measure. It may be stressful to be at the bottom, but it can also be stressful at the top -- the pressure to maintain one's success, for example. "Does that mean that there is such a thing as good stress and bad stress?" she asks. The social-class research also needs to branch out and investigate if other factors are at work. For example, says Gorman, there is a tendency for children to stay in the same general socioeconomic stratum as their parents. "There is also evidence," she says, "that environmental deficits in the womb and early in life" can seriously affect a persons health later on. Thus poor adults, who may simply be the inheritors of a poor childhood, may exhibit a less healthy adult life cycle -- not because of lower-class stress but rather because they may have been exposed to more lead or more pollution, or obtained less medical attention, when they were children.