Saturday 20 April 2019

The Roseta's Health Secret - Power of Community

The Power of community to create health is far greater than any physician, clinic or hospital - Mark Hyman

When I told my friends that, I am planning to go back to my hometown after achieving the Financial Freedom. Some of them asked me, why? I answered that "I need to live a healthy life, by spending quality time with my family and friends". On hearing this answer, they laughed at me. Even though I know that "I am right", I don't have any scientific proof to show them.

Recently, while reading the book "Outlier" written by Malcolm Gladwell, I am pleasantly surprised to know Rosetta's health secret. Yes, it is the 'Power of a community' that has kept them healthy for many decades. Yes, I got my scientific proof done by the physician Wolf at Roseto, Pennsylvania.

Below is the extract from the book "Outlier" in which the author has decrypted the mystery of Roseta's health secret.

"If you had wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian. Roseto, Pennsylvania, was its own tiny, self-sufficient world.

Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma.

In Roseto, virtually no one under fifty-five had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over sixty-five, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was 30 to 35 percent lower than expected.




There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That’s it. Wolf’s profession had a name for a place like Roseto — a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.

What Wolf began to realize was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or location. It had to be Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards.


They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded.



They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

The Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.


No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community. Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn’t be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual’s personal choices or actions in isolation.


They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are."



A Request from Author :
If you like this article, please share it with your family and friends. It might en(ligthen) them to spend their quality time with You. 

You are kindly requested to join my mission to Donate a Meal to start making a positive difference in someone's life. You are born with the ability to change someone life positively, please give your life a chance.

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