Diseases of affluence

Diseases of affluence are those diseases which are thought to be a result of increasing wealth in a society.

Examples

They are thought to include diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, allergies, autoimmune diseases, asthma, alcoholism, depressionand possibly a range or majority of other psychiatric illnesses.

Communicable vs. non-communicable diseases

Some of these illnesses are inter-related, for example obesity is thought to be a partial cause of many other illnesses. They are characterised as being non-communicable diseases, whereas the diseases of poverty tend to be largely communicable either through infection, poor public or environmental health provision, or poor hygiene.

The trend is for these diseases to become more prevalent as starvation and diseases of poverty decline, and as longevity increases. Policy makers are sometimes criticised on sociological grounds for failing to deal with the fact that development could be seen as self-defeating if it means exchanging one set of diseases for another.

Possible causes of the diseases of affluence

Factors associated with the increase of these illnesses appear to be, paradoxically, things which many people would regard as improvements in their lives. They include:

• Increased use of the car
• Less strenuous physical exercise
• Easy accessibility in society to large amounts of low-cost food (relative to the much-lower caloric food availability in a subsistence economy)
  • More food generally, with much less physical exertion expended to obtain a moderate amount of food
  • More high fat and high sugar foods in the diet are common in the affluent developed economies of the late-twentieth century
  • More foods which are processed, cooked, and commercially provided (rather than seasonal, fresh foods prepared locally at time of eating)[1]
• Reduced exposure to infectious agents throughout life
• Increased leisure time
• Prolonged periods of inactivity
• Greater use of alcohol and tobacco
• Greater use of antibiotics and vaccines
• Longer life-spans

See also

• Health
• Exercise
• Nutrition
• China project

• Urbanisation
• Westernization

External links

• China project
• A critical view of development
• Guardian article on fast food and obesity

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases+of+affluence Wikipedia article Diseases of affluence.