B Egolf, J Lasker, S Wolf, and L Potvin
American Journal of Public Health (August 1992)
People are nourished by other people. The importance of social networks in health and longevity has been confirmed again by study of a close-knit Italian-American community in Roseto, Pennsylvania. Roseto seems a diorama of what once was the nation's ideal lifestyle-neighbors who looked after one another, civic-minded joiners and doers who formed the grass roots of American-style democracy.
Thirty years earlier, medical researchers were drawn to Roseto by a bewildering statistic: in defiance of medical logic, Rosetans seemed nearly immune to one of the most common causes of death. They died of heart attacks at a rate only half of the rest of America. Doctors were mystified in that residents led what medical textbooks predicted would be short lives.The men of the village smoked and drank wine freely. They spent their days in backbreaking, hazardous labour, working 200 feet down in nearby slate quarries. At home, the dinner tables each evening were laden with traditional Italian food, modified for local ingredients in ways that would drive a dietitian to despair. The Mediterranean diet, with its use of olive oil rather than animal fat, has been touted for health benefits. But, poor immigrants couldn't afford to import cooking oil from their homeland and instead fry their sausages and brown their meatballs in lard. Yet, the resulting hefty bodies contained unusually health hearts. Why?
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