5 ms·
Smart people ≠ healthy people
by xd1936 8y ago
Smart people ≠ healthy people
- ikeboy 8y agoThere's a strong correlation between IQ and life expectancy, possibly mostly genetic
- Retric 8y agoIt's also likely the other direction, with health growing up resulting in higher IQ.
- ikeboy 8y agoFor insurance purposes if you can learn someone's IQ without learning their health status you still get evidence about their future health
- acdha 8y agoIQ historically has had a strong correlation with social status and affluence, which also implies access to healthcare, ability to eat a balanced diet or go to the gym, etc.
- bluGill 8y agoMy guess is it is childhood. I see poor people eating junk food all the time and feed that to their kids - the kids are fat on empty calories and so the brain doesn't get what it needs to grow smart. That is just a guess though. I don't have the ability to verify it.
- otakucode 8y agoThere are plenty of fat smart people. The brain does not develop, and especially does not develop knowledge, as a result of the passage of time and metabolic processes. It develops, both structurally and in terms of 'contents', solely as a response to repeated stimulus. We don't really have a word for a situation where a persons life is impoverished due to lack of intellectual stimulus, but we certainly have the condition. Some kids grow up in homes where if they ask a question, they'll get an answer. Others grow up in homes where an asked question is replied to by the parent dismissively saying 'I don't know' (sending a clear message that the child shouldn't want to know) as they turn back to reading about celebrity gossip. No amount of clean eating can overcome that sort of poverty. Internet access can, though.
- bluGill 8y agoThere are people who eat enough healthy food to get the needed nutrition, along with the junk food. Be honest here: we are both speculating about that which we don't know, and it is hard to study.
- pizza 8y agoThat being said, insulin resistance / T2DM is associated with the thinning of cortical tissue [0] - insulin resistance being the typical cause of burgeoning fat storage. Additionally, the brain runs well on ketones [1], which are an abundant supply of fuel on the insulin-resistance-reversing ketogenic diet. All I'm saying is there may be some benefit for the many fat smart people in taking up some kind of insulin-resistance-reversing diet; lo, for all the fat people (, as well as the thin-yet-still-insulin resistant people, too). But ketosis is not exactly the default path-of-least-resistance for most people, given the standard american diet, conventional nutritional 'wisdom', etc. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25439756 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25439756 [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15877199 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15877199
- rsynnott 8y agoTwin studies have tended to indicate that IQ is quite dependent on socio-economic status (thereby raising the question of what IQ is actually _measuring_, but anyway...). Socio-economic status is also highly relevant to life expectancy.