While it is important to talk about issues like smoking, exercising, eating habits, mental and emotional health, and so on, it is also important that we expand our horizons and discuss matters than are typically not talked about when it comes to discussions on health. Chief among these is the relationships between education and health.
On September 9th the Commission to Build a Healthier America, supported and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, published an issue brief focused on education and health. Chief among the findings discussed in the brief are as follows:
A large body of evidence links education with health, even when other factors like income are taken into account.A link to the entire issue brief can be found here.
People with more education are likely to live longer and experience better health outcomes.
Educational attainment among adults is linked with children’s health as well, beginning early in life.
The United States is the only industrialized nation where young people currently are less likely than members of their parents’ generation to be high-school graduates.
Education is linked with health through three major interrelated pathways: health knowledge and behaviors, employment and income, and social and psychological factors.
More education can lead to higher-paying jobs, which enable people to obtain health care when needed, provide themselves and their families with more nutritious foods, and live in safer and healthier homes and neighborhoods with supermarkets, parks and places to exercise—all of which can promote good health by making it easier to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors.
Social and psychological factors linked with education can influence health through pathways related to stress, health-related behaviors, and practical and emotional support.
Parents’ educational attainment is linked to their children’s health and their children’s educational attainment—both of which influence their children’s health as adults.
The level of educational attainment children eventually achieve also affects the health of their own children—perpetuating a vicious intergenerational cycle of low educational attainment and poorer health.
By providing the knowledge and skills necessary to fully participate in the labor force, education can be key in promoting social mobility and in breaking the cycle of intergenerational disadvantage and related health disparities.
Yesterday I started to write a sarcastic parody of a response in contrary to the findings of this brief; for no other reason than to start an (hopefully) interesting discussion. As I was writing I noticed that some of my sarcasm was less sarcastic and more so based on true opinion; such as the idea that we as a society look to find a scapegoat to blame for many of our problems (that was almost physically painful not to use quotations to note sarcasm...). So I stopped writing, deleted what I had begun and went home to ponder these new strange and somewhat distressing ideas. And that’s when it hit me.
ReplyDeleteOk, I need to preface that my mother-in-law, who turned 87 years old two days ago, lives with her son (who, as it happens so often, would also be my husband) and me. So, my MIL ambushed me in the kitchen with the typical "When you have a moment, I have a question for you…” (yes that was a direct quote). It turns out that McDonalds has begun including nutritional information on their packaging and she and my husband had had an argument about what the percentages meant. After a half hour of explaining the concept behind the 1500 calorie daily intake diet, the difference between a calorie and a carbohydrate, and what those pesky little percentages meant, I came to realize that maybe this Commission to Build a Heathier America just quite possibly may, perhaps, have a valid point to the nonsense.
Yes my moment as mediator last night may be the most rudimentary form of analogy to describe the correlation between health and education. And quite possibly in my deficiency of knowledge in the field I have failed to reconcile other concepts and ideas posed by the commission... but hey, ya gotta start somewhere...even if it's an 87 yr old pain in my....but I digress....