Good Thoughts – Bad Thoughts . . .

. . . and their effects on your health. You’ve probably thought it likely that your attitude to life can impact your health, but now two studies have been published that add some evidence to this popular concept.

Writing in the Annals of Family Medicine, University of Rochester researchers describe the effect of optimistic belief on the occurrence of heart attack and stroke – in men, but not in women. They started from the premise that many people consider their cardiovascular disease risk to be lower than that which would be estimated by well-established clinical tests. They conducted a 15-year surveillance study on 2,800 adults in New England with no history of heart disease. The critical question they asked at enrollment was: “Compared with persons of your own age and sex, how would you rate your risk of having a heart attack in the next 5 years?” Almost half the men who rated their risk as “low” would have been classified by objective medical tests as having a “high” or “very high” risk. Most women were far more accurate in their self-assessment.

Using national death Index records, the researchers found that those men who rated themselves as being at low risk had an actual rate of death from heart attack or stroke that was one third that of the men with high or average self-rated risk. This result was unaltered even after making adjustments for cardiovascular risk assessment at baseline, as well as for other social and biological factors, such as age, sex, race, income, education, and so on. The association therefore seems real enough. The question is, should one try to disabuse optimistic men of their erroneous perception? After all, their existing cardiovascular risk factors should be addressed . . .

The second example of a relationship between attitude and health is the effect of morbid thoughts on appetite. It seems that people who think more about their own deaths want to eat more, according to a report in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Participants in the study were asked to write essays on their feelings about their own deaths at some distant time in the future, or (acting as controls) about a painful medical procedure. They then had to check off items on a grocery list, or they were offered cookies. Those who wrote about their deaths wanted to buy more groceries, or ate more cookies, than those who wrote about a medical procedure. The authors of the study say: “When people are reminded of their inevitable mortality, they may start to feel uncomfortable about what they have done with their lives, and whether they have made a significant mark on the universe. This is a state called ‘heightened self-awareness’. One way to deal with such an uncomfortable state is to escape from it, by either overeating or overspending”.

The researchers go onto speculate that TV news or crime programs might stimulate over-consumption in people with low self-esteem. This seems to me to be quite a leap, without evidence. Violence and death on TV has become a whipping-boy for many trends today, but the idea that they lead to overweight seems rather overstated.