Social Status and Health NYtimes article about EMPH publication

Todays NYTimes has an article by  Christopher von Rueden summarizing his recent publication in Evolution, Medicine, & Public Health on how low social status influences health: Political influence associates with cortisol and health among egalitarian forager-farmers  (open access)

Evolution, Medicine, & Public Health is  the venue for important publications in our field. Publication fees are waived for a short time,  author’s instructions are here.

WHAT is the relationship between social status and health?  

by Christopher von Rueden in the New York Times December 14, 2014

This is a tricky question. In modern industrialized societies, health certainly improves as you move up the socioeconomic ladder, but much of that trend is a result of health care and lifestyle factors (diet, physical activity) that are associated with income — not relative social position per se.

If you want to see how status affects health, you have to isolate status from material wealth. How to do that? The easiest way is to observe a society in which there is minimal material wealth to contest and where there are limited avenues for status competition.

So that is what my colleagues and I did. For several years, we studied the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Bolivia, (read more)