Culture and economics: the intersection

Doug Woodard wrote:

Scientists find alarming deterioration of the functionality of the DNA of the urban poor due to environmental causes:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/08/poverty-race-ethnicity-dna-telo...

I'm reminded of the studies several decades ago of the inhabitants of a small U.S. town called Roseto and their resistance to heart disease apparently due to their common well-preserved Italian culture - including diet? I don't know if the interactions were ever resolved.

I think it was a study that suggested that diet was possibly not the important factor in the resistance to heart disease, but rather community.  Initially it was felt that the Mediterranean diet of Italians (in Italy) was responsible for less heart disease.  But, I think it was found that many aspects of that diet had changed with immigrants to this small US town, yet they still had similar rates of heart disease to their European brethren.  So, since diet was deemed to not be too different from a nutritional standpoint from other Americans, the question became why this group did better than other Americans.  They theorized that it was the close-knit social grouping of families living together within this group, relative to other Americans, that caused this.  As later generations of this group adopted the more spread out social setting of other Americans, they found that heart disease levels went up.  At least, that's how I remember reading of the study.

ETA:  It's described here: 

Quote:

The data confirmed the existence of consistent mortality differences between Roseto and Bangor during a time when there were many indicators of greater social solidarity and homogeneity in Roseto.

As I mentioned, I believe it was the social solidarity rather than the diet that was seen as the main factor, though I didn't take the time to read beyond the description provided at the link (IE, I didn't read the actual article).