Impact of Socioeconomic Position on Health

              The topic of Nature vs Nurture has been causing debates for years and does not seem to be coming to any set verdict.  Different areas have shown to be more nature based and others more nurtured based, there’s not one set decision for all aspects of life.  So what about health?  I’ve found that people can often be very harsh and ignorant when it comes to obesity, they often make comments about how it is their fault and they need to change their ways.  While there is evidence supporting that health issues are nurture related—you can’t sit on the couch and eat McDonalds every single day without expecting to gain weight and have health problems—there are circumstances where nature plays a role in health issues.

              Socioeconomic position has proven to be a component to health.  Dr. Hackman wrote two papers studying socioeconomic position and its effect on health, Selective Impact of Early Parental Responsivity on Adolescent Stress Reactivity and Socioeconomic Status and the Developing Brain.  In his research, Dr. Hackman discovered that socioeconomic position does have an effect on health, people born into a higher socioeconomic position have greater health advantages because of various reasons such as better access to doctors and nutrition while those born into lower socioeconomic position seem to suffer more mentally from stress which shows up by negatively affecting their health.

          Karolyn A. Gazella wrote an article for Psychology Today in which she discussed this very topic.  The article was title The Impact of Socioeconomic Status on Health: As the rich get richer, do they also get healthier?  In her article, Gazella address a previous article that found that “increased obesity was linked to income below poverty level, receipt of food stamps, and lower income in general.”  People who live below the poverty level have less access to good, healthy foods—they tend to only be able to afford food off less quality. 

 Another health issue related to socioeconomic standing is sleep complaints.  It was found that people who are unemployed or make less than $75,000 annually have a much larger sleep complaint rate.  Lack of sleep is one of the main causes of health issues, without sleep your immune system becomes weaker and your chances of developing diabetes, heart disease, and obesity increase.  A study from Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that insulin resistance is built up after even just one single night with four or less hours of sleep.  This insulin resistance leads to both obesity and diabetes.  Thus, people who are of a lower socioeconomic standing and are unemployed tend to have higher levels of stress, less sleep, and greater chances of diabetes, obesity, and heart problems.

With this information supporting that socioeconomic position does in fact have an impact on health, Gazella believes that people need to be better educated on diets and lifestyles rather than improving health care systems; improving access to higher-quality foods is more important.  She believes that improving health care treatments is not going to help those in the lower socioeconomic status who really need the help, because they won’t be able to afford the treatments.  By improving and increasing health care treatments health care costs are going to go up and be even more inaccessible. 

Citations 

Hackman: Hackman DA, Betancourt LM, Brodsky NL, Kobrin L, Hurt H, Farah MJ (2013) Selective Impact of Early Parental Responsivity on Adolescent Stress Reactivity. PLoS ONE 8(3): e58250. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058250

Hackman:  Hackman, Daniel A., and Martha J. Farah. “Socioeconomic Status and the Developing Brain.” Trends in cognitive sciences 13.2 (2009): 65–73. PMC. Web. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3575682/

Article: Gazella, Karolyn A. "The Impact of Socioeconomic Status on Health." Psychology Today. N.p., n.d. Web. <https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-healing-factor/201201/the-impact-socioeconomic-status-health>.

Picture: "Obesity, the Metabolic Disease." Obesity, the Metabolic Disease. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.ethicon.com/healthcare-professionals/specialties/obesity/obesity-overview>.