Thursday 28 September 2006

Pic of the day: Watching TV is usually a very passive activity, but your mileage may vary. (Screenshot from the anime Kamisama Kazoku.)

Education and health

I have read already years ago that people with higher education tend to live longer and healthier lives. They also tend to earn more money, which you might think would be the reason. But even here in Norway, where health care is heavily socialized, the difference persists. In fact, the higher spending on health care in the USA does not seem to have any noticeable impact on the country's overall health. Spending on health care is important up to a certain level, but then the law of diminishing returns sets in. Even if the super rich spend millions to save their hide, they can only extend their life a little, while the same amount spent on the poor might have given centuries of human life, although divided among many.

Be that as it may, I think anti-aging campaigner Aubrey de Grey is onto something. He says that people who have an education and the opportunity to use it, never feel bored and cannot imagine ever feeling bored again. Whereas those with little education are easily bored, so they sit down in front of the television and stay there watching soap operas. (They also, in my observation, eat snacks while sitting there but forget about it once the program ends. "Darned kids have eaten all the chips again!") Obese and inactive, the uneducated then fall prey to various lifestyle diseases, rendering their boring lives painful and short.

There is, if so, a kind of poetic justice in that the bored are taken more hastily from this world (on average, at least). But surely it would have been better if they were not bored in the first place. And extra good if they had been educated in the first place.

I am not so sure that formal education is the most accurate key, though. Of course I am highly biased here: While I did take five years of high school level education (three year general and two year economics) I only had two winters of college. Not even full years. So by today's standard, I am not highly educated. But I am also not bored. I have memories of boredom, but it is not a part of my daily life. Nor do I expect boredom to set in until my body decays drastically. And intriguingly, I have never owned (or rented) a TV. This is not a sacrifice; rather, I could not squeeze in the time for watching TV without squeezing out something more interesting. Only sleep and work are less interesting to me of the things I do now.

I am led to believe that the education gap is wider in some other countries, among them the USA, although I am not sure about the UK where de Grey lives and works. Probably there too. In America, there are a goodly number of people who dropped out of high school, if I understand correctly. Perhaps it is these people who just sit in front of the TV in their cheap and shoddy housing and grow slowly fatter on the legendary cheap food there. Or perhaps conversely most people have a poor education by de Grey's standard, which is certainly possible, and I am just a lucky exception. If an exception at all: I may have only moderate higher education, but I have spent lot of time and some money on educating myself in other ways. And I still do.

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Of course, good genes don't hurt. But are there genes that influence both obesity and education? Actually there are. Intelligence can influence both of them, although it is certainly not the only thing. You can be smart and fat, but it takes a little more. You can be less than brilliant and have an advanced education, but again it takes a lot of work. Such a person would probably have an awesome willpower, which might also come in useful at the table. So yes, there may be a genetic component to it.

Thinking of the mentally retarded women I have met, there were very few of them who were not obese. (Retarded men tend to have another interest that is not fattening, but I won't talk about that here.) On the other hand, thinking of the fat women I have met, not nearly all of them were retarded. Still, it could be enough to distort the statistics. In that case, trying to force a long education on people to preserve their health may not work. Unless you educate them specifically in how to live a healthier life, which may not be a bad idea.

When I went to school, we had physical exercise regularly. But it was something we were told to do. We did not learn why, we were not motivated to make it a fundamental part of our life (except those who were really good at football). We did not understand, and we graduated from high school still not understanding. I am led to believe that this has been improved somewhat since that time (in the 1970es), but still: Considering how essential our health is to us, learning to understand healthy living could be the most important part of our education besides basic literacy.

And if you have basic literacy, why are you bored anyway? Of course, sitting with a good book or a computer is not a lot more active than sitting in front of the TV, but you are at least less likely to snack. And it makes your brain stronger, not weaker, as the TV does.