By Katherine Ellison, The Washington Post, July 31, 2021
Remember the lines from that old folk song?
“If living were a thing that money could buy
“You know the rich would live and the poor would die.”
Sadly, research shows there’s little “if” about it. On average, poor people live less healthy lives and are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as the rich. That’s true for many well-documented reasons, including less healthy diets with too much processed food, polluted neighborhoods and a lot more toxic stress. In recent years, however, researchers have added one more factor to this mix: It turns out that the poor, as well as socially disadvantaged racial minorities, sleep much less well on average than the rich, which can take a major toll on their physical and mental health.
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