ShareThisThe markets may go back up, housing and auto sales may recover, unemployment rates may shrink, but researchers say it's almost certain that one effect of the recession will linger for many years -- poor health.
Recession ratchets up risk factors for many kinds of disease, from depression and other mental illnesses to heart disease and cancer.
People in hard times face more stress, drink more, smoke more, have more troubled sleep and presumably eat less healthy foods.
But, the glass-half-full crowd might argue, less money and less work could also produce positive health effects -- more time to exercise and eat healthier meals, less noshing on high-calorie meals at restaurants.
Recent research suggests we could go either way.
Food-marketing tracers report an uptick in sales of snack foods, doughnuts, frozen meals and peanut butter and jelly in the past year or so.
And a new study, by researchers at Ohio State University, looked at the impact of people living for an extended time on food stamps versus not relying on the subsidy program, and found that those using food stamps, especially women, were heavier.
Researchers tracked nearly 10,000 people for 14 years, many of whom went in and out of the food-stamp program several times, and found that body mass index rose more when they were in the program than out.
"Every way we looked at the data, it was clear that use of food stamps was associated with weight gain," said Jay Zagorsky, a co-author of the study appearing in a recent issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology.
With benefits running an average of $81 a month in 2002, the last year of the study, Zagorsky said it would be difficult for shoppers to buy healthy nutritious foods on such a budget. So calorie-dense, high-fat, processed foods that are less expensive win out over healthier foods on what might be considered the ultimate recession diet.
But another researcher, Stacy L. Wood, associate professor of marketing at the University of South Carolina, punches some holes in the notion that people turn to comfort foods in unsettled times.
She reports in the Journal of Economic Research that experiments found when people were offered a familiar snack food or one that was more exotic, those experiencing change in their lives went for the new and unfamiliar option, while those who described their circumstances as stable were more likely to stick with the old standard.
The choice pattern even held true with non-food options, such as music or video selections. Wood said the findings suggest that times of change and disruption of our normal lives may well be a good time to break away from unhealthy standbys.
Still, the bulk of research, both historically and lately, suggests that recessions are no good for our health overall.
Harvey Brenner, a pioneering sociologist at the University of North Texas, has been linking high levels of unemployment to subsequent higher mortality rates for three decades.
More recently, though, he and other researchers say the effects of stress, poor diet and other factors seem to be compounded by people losing health coverage and the ability to pay for health care, making the damage to health even more immediate as people skip or cut back on treatment and screening.
"This economic downturn is showing how quickly the effects of unemployment, and thus, reduction in health-care expenditures is resulting in mortality,'' Brenner said. "In the past, we say people die (at higher-than-expected rates) within 10 years after their job loss. Now, we are seeing them die as early as in the same year."
Another report, published online this week in the American Journal of Public Health by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, looked at people whose mortgages had been foreclosed.
They found that nearly half of those studied while undergoing foreclosure reported symptoms of depression, and 37 percent met screening criteria for major depression. They also reported inability to afford prescriptions, significant unpaid medical bills and were nearly three times more likely to be uninsured compared with a sample of residents from the same area around Philadelphia.
"The foreclosure crisis is also a health-care crisis,'' said Dr. Craig Pollack, lead author of the study. "We need to do more to ensure that if people lose their homes, they don't also lose their health."
(Contact Lee Bowman at BowmanL(at)shns.com)
THE MEDICAL JOURNAL
