The Reality Check Episode 24

Social Class/Health+Chemophobia+Black Belt Myth

Part 1: Social Class/Health

Which one is worse for your health? The Reality Check will talk about if social rank is is more important than obesity for heart attacks. 

There's this book called Genome by Mark Ridley, and in the chapters he discusses how stress affects our lives. How it can depress one's immune system and cause one to get sick much easier. He talked about in another chapter about the experiment that has been done before where a group of scientists examine 17000 British civil servants. It was called the White House studies. Age 20 to 64. From the results, the status of a person's job is the most reliable predictor of heart attack. The men who has lower ranking jobs have a threefold higher mortality rate than men in the higher rank. The men with the lower ranking jobs smoke more, have less leisure time, but if you take all these things out. These men still had a relative rate of 2.1 for heart disease compared to the people in the higher rank. 

But why would this be? We always thought the people in the higher rank would get heart diseases much easier. So from what the Reality Check found out is that the people in the higher rank has more flexibility in their lives and can choose for some things, but the people with the lower ranking jobs have no flexibility at all, therefore that causes more stress. 

The weird thing is that for heart attacks, the higher up in society you are, the less likely you'll get it, and the lower you are, the more likely you'll get it. The scientists found out that this actually goes for many of the diseases. 

Social factors might be effecting our healthy much more than we realize, we always think it's something in our control. Your job rank might also have a huge effect. 

Part 1:

Most of the people today think the best way to not get cancer is to not have too much bad chemicals inside you. So what are chemicals? Well, basically almost everything can be defined as chemicals. But, people are mostly worried about artificial chemicals. 

So why are we so afraid of chemicals? The media, once again, messes with our minds. In school, we see many chemical bottled up with warning signs on them. We see chemicals put together with the danger skull sign. So, now we have plenty of companies selling what they call "natural" chemical products. Just because it's organic, doesn't mean it's safe to use; there are many of natural chemicals that are very dangerous. 

Science Myth of the Week: Whether Black Belts need to Register their Hands as Lethal Weapons. 

Of course it's not true! Or they would have to take their hands and feet off when they get on a plane.