Great Health Part 6

Improving Your Metabolic Health.

Great health requires resilience in the following 4 domains:
1.  Physical
2.  Social
3.  Mental
4.  Emotional

Why, How and What can improve our social resilience?

In Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers he tells the story of a community of especially long lived persons that moved from the mountain region of Italy to the mountain region of America and continued to enjoy excellent health and longevity.  Medical researchers were perplexed because this population defied the predictions of morbidity and mortality based on traditional predictors of diabetes, cholesterol and smoking.  Tellingly, the excellent health and longevity evaporated as persons left the community to dwell elsewhere.  The confounding variable was proved to be the caring social community or the excellent social connections of their community.

Did you know that the full name of Family Medicine is Family and Community Medicine?

Your personal family physician wants to individually treat you in the context of your family, faith, vocation, avocations and community.

Speaking of community and family, Charles Murray studied success and happiness in America.  He defined success as high education and high income through data mining comparing the 7th percentile with the 93rd percentile zip code communities.
He discovered that the relative success and happiness were determined by 4 measures, 2 personal characteristics and 2 institutions as follows:

1.  Industriousness.
2.  Honesty
3.  Marriage.
4.  Religiosity.

Happiness was determined by a good job, a good marriage, personal faith and living in community where people care about one another.

Paraphrasing a secular and universal summary of Jewish and Christian scriptures;  Love the good with all your heart, soul and mind and your neighbor as yourself.  This means to love yourself a little less and others a little more for mutual benefit; so love yourself 150% and others 150% to promote social resilience, improve health and increase longevity.

Consider that all work is honorable and deserves your best efforts performed with honesty and integrity.  Consider marriage and family as economic and corporate growth.  Poverty is decreased to single digits by completing three tasks; graduating from high school, marrying after age 20 and delaying children until after marriage.  Violating one of these tasks results in a substantial increase in poverty up to 88%.  Also, consider the context of your spiritual life and develop an ecumenical respect for the faith of others.

Cultivate your social and community relationships and roles.