Roseto Mystery is the secret of Health, Happiness and Life often overlooked. Here, we discuss an article to unravel that mystery.
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| A stress free life with community |
Flocks of people back home started migrating to this new land when the word of this hope reached them across the ocean. The Rosetans began buying land next to Bangor and created a town called Roseto. Neighbouring town was mostly Welsh and English and next town German which meant that Rosetans strictly stay in Roseto owing to the relations between German, English and Italian.
Roseto, Pennsylvania was a tiny, self sufficient world unknown by the society around it until Stewart Wolf, a physician discovered a mystery that lied in its simplicity.
Mystery lies in simplicityWolf, a physician of digestion at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1950's was once giving a talk at the local medical society in one of the towns when a local doctors with a 17 year career approached him and said that I get patients from everywhere but rarely find anyone below 65 years from Roseto with a heart disease.
Wolf was astonished as heart disease was an epidemic in the US with no drugs or treatments invented for it and heart disease was a common cause of death in men under 65 years all over United States. It was impossible to be a doctor and not see heart disease.
What did Wolf do? He started investigating and took the following measures.
- He pulled up the death records of the people from the town. He analyzed physician records, medical histories, constructed family genealogies.
- He tested every single person in the town for heart disease.
He found that virtually no one under 55 years old had died of a heart attack. For men over 65 years, death due to heart failure was roughly half that of US as a whole. Infact, over all death rate was 30%-35% less than expected. There was no drug addiction, no suicide, no alcoholism, nobody living on state welfare infact no big illnesses. People just died of old age.
Of all the things in life, People are the ones I value the most
So what was the next step. He got help from others and then researched further.
- Was it healthy food? NO. Rosetans eating habits were not healthy. They didn't do much exercise, smoked heavily and were struggling with obesity.
- Was it genes? NO. Rosetans had relatives living in other parts of US who were dying of the same ailments as others like heart disease.
- Was it location? NO. The people in the neighbouring towns were hard working immigrants like them but they suffered from all the diseases unlike them.
So, what was the mystery for a healthy life then ?
The mystery didn't lie in diet or exercise or genes or location.
The secret was Roseto itselfRoseto was magical and the magical life it gave to the people and their health was because of the strong community sense it carried.
- Three generation family meals under a roof
- Younger respecting elders
- Attending church together every Sunday
- Sitting at porches, standing in the streets and talking to each other, visiting each other, cooking for each other
- Holding tight to the extended family system, helping the needy, restricting the wealthy from flaunting
Thus, they had weaved for them a protective and powerful social structure insulating them from the stress and the pressures of the outside world.
To have a healthy life, people and relationships with you are very important. The basic secret is to lead a stress free life. What contributes to this is the culture, the family and friends, the values of the world, the people we surround ourselves with. These have the most profound influence on who we are and that is the secret of healthy and happy life that most of us are unaware of , miss out on or ignore. The stronger the community sense, the easier the life.
Source : From the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
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