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Comment by rmunn | Hacker News Reader

Wealth per se has nothing to do with longevity, as a minute's thought will make plain. What wealth does do is enable certain things that help with longevity, such as better medical care. If you're using wealth as a measure, you need to realize that it's only a proxy, and you'll get better data by looking at the actual behaviors that it's a proxy for.

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Basically a good point. Merely never ending up in situations where it's a struggle to make ends meet has a huge impact on stress though. You often don't even have to use the wealth in order to benefit with respect to stress.

Such a strange comment. Wealth has nothing to do with longevity and yet here's all the ways how wealth CAUSES longevity.

>Wealth per se

For example, if you have $10m but never go to the doctor, you won't benefit from the medical care discrepancy between wealthy and poor

But you won't have poverty related stress.

But you will have "hey man lend me 10000 my moms dying" stress

Just my experience but I have never found the medical industry useful for health. I have found they mostly tinker with feedback loops to give the illusion of health.

Eating right, exercise, supplementation of the things I am missing from my diet, clean air, avoiding chronic stressful situations and people are the only things I have found to benefit me. But that's just my own anecdotal experience. (n=1)

At minimum medical industry is good for providing various measurements regarding the state of your health and environment. This can get quite pricey quite fast.

You'll benefit from:

1. Less stress, better rest from better living conditions, that are quiet and have superb clean air and delegating stressful things to others

2. Waay better food

3. Comfortable stress-free vacations

4. Personal trainers, personal massages, spas, you name it

Etc, etc, etc.

If you have the wealth, but don't use it, you won't benefit from it. No shot!

> such as better medical care

Better food, comes first

Thing is, better food is available to the poor as well, you just have to be willing to put in the work for it. Buy vegetables and make salads instead of spending the same amount of money at McDonald's, for example. The price of fresh vegetables at Walmart has never been out of reach even for someone working 40 hours for minimum wage. Housing might be ridiculously expensive, and medical care if you don't have insurance? Good luck. But basic vegetables? Rice and beans? (Which make for a complete set of amino acids, BTW: there's a reason rice and beans is such a popular dish in Central America). Those have stayed affordable even when the price of other things has gone up.

Now, I'll grant that there are plenty of poor people who are drinking soda and eating junk food. Not going to deny that. But I have always been able to go to Walmart and buy lettuce and tomatoes for my salads, and I've never seen the price of those basics skyrocket like the price of eggs (at one point) or meat have. So the poor people who are drinking soda instead of water, and eating chips instead of salads? They're choosing those foods, not being forced into them by poverty.

There are plenty of areas where rich people have a big advantage over poor people in terms of access to things that provide longevity. But food, at least in America (the only country whose food prices I'm familiar enough with to talk intelligently about), just isn't one of them.

Now, you could argue that poor people didn't grow up with parents who taught them how to cook healthy food on a tight budget. Yes, that's true for many (not all) of the poor (again, at least in America, I don't know enough about other countries here). But there, it's not being poor that's keeping them from eating healthy, it's not being taught. Money isn't the limiting factor there.

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