“Rich People’s Illness” and “Poor People’s Illness”

Junk food is convenient and cheap, but it’s not good for your health. Vegetables are good for you, but they are getting more and more expensive. Can money buy health? Josei Seven says: Yes – but the rich have their characteristic health problems too, and as to the shrinking middle class, its position between the proverbial rock and the hard place is in some ways the unhealthiest of all.

Postwar Japan prided itself on its large and growing middle class. Everyone can, and soon will be a part of it. The gap between rich and poor will be a thing of the past -- as the past has proved. Unexpectedly, there is still a gap between rich and poor in the future, as it is now showing. There is a growing gap between today’s rich and poor, who eat differently, have different levels of education, and live and work differently. There are many ways to measure health, and the different measures contradict each other, but Katsunori Kondo, a professor of medicine at Chiba University, offers an unusual, if not decisive, measure: low-income people earning less than 2 million yen are two to three times as likely to die as those earning more than 6 million yen.

The key to good health is to eat a balanced diet, but “a balanced diet is not cheap,” Kondo said. And it takes time to do it. Who has the time now? The rich have more time, but even they need to work and have little spare time. But at least they can afford quality food that poor people often cannot. Ready-to-eat substitutes, like instant noodles, snack cakes, and other similar foods, can lead to obesity, with the risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, cerebral hemorrhage and bowel cancer.

Vegetables are important to our body and organs, but less and less appear on the table of the poor. The catastrophic climate has cut the harvest of vegetables, causing vegetable prices to rise. Let’s not mention typhoons this summer, the lack of daylight in Kanto doubled the price of cucumbers. The rich can shrug that off. The poor can’t.

There are other aspects of the health gap between the rich and the poor. Low incomes can cause high levels of anxiety - especially among pensioners over 65. Kondo told Josei Seven that older people with low incomes are very likely to suffer from insomnia. (Insomniacs were common even among high-income seniors: 49% of them suffered from some degree of insomnia, compared with 60% of low-income seniors.)

Depression is also associated with poverty, but the rich are not immune to it. Clinical depression is severe - it is a factor in 60% of suicides. Then there are cancers, heart diseases and strokes. Older people with lower incomes are five times more likely to suffer from depression than those with higher incomes.

If we turn to the young and the affluent, which of them are most likely to suffer from depression? Koji Wada, a professor at the International University of Medical Welfare, said it was those middle managers. They are the most stressed people in Japan and in the world, Finland and Denmark are second only to Japan, Wada said. Many of them are just nominal managers, saddled with impossible quotas and not paid for overtime. Wada said that women managers, even those with high incomes, have an increased risk of breast cancer.

Middle-income earners can at least enjoy the benefits of the company’s regular medical examinations. On the whole, they can afford a balanced diet, but whether their jobs leave them leisure time is another question. Josei Seven found that their biggest health challenge was being inactive. Rich people can work out in sports clubs. A blue-collar job is to exercise. Middle-income office workers, on the other hand, sit at their desks for hours staring at computer monitors. In terms of health, everyone knows what will happen.