Health is Wealth: Where This New Trend Is Taking Us?

Have you got your Peloton yet?

Photo by Alex Lvrs on Unsplash

One of my addictions is to follow healthy recipe accounts on Instagram. I have more recipes’ screenshots on my phone’s gallery than the Kardashians have in millions. And one of the things that these accounts praise is: Health is Wealth.

This statement can be seen in tote bags, which, to be honest, I would happily buy if I could afford them. But there is so much behind this simple phrase. Let’s analyse it!

Overall, for people to be wealthy, they need to be healthy because, for most people, wealth is built with work, and to afford to work, you need to be physically and mentally in “good shape”. Most people lose everything they have when they get sick, because first they can’t work, and secondly, they need to spend their money to get medical treatments, which in most countries are expensive. In some cases, they even lose their houses and become homeless.

On the other hand, for people to be healthy, they don’t necessarily need to be wealthy, of course, that external life conditions of someone will interfere with how healthy they are, but there is something that money can’t buy, at least not in theory, your DNA. You are born with unique characteristics, which explains someone who spent a lifetime smoking not having lung cancer and someone who never smoked a cigarette in their life dying of lung cancer. People have different predispositions to certain medical conditions.

That’s why in many cases, no matter how much money you have, you still need to deal with health conditions, and we have many examples in the media for that. But of course, most people that have money are much healthier than the average person. Mostly, they have money to afford private health care, and that changes everything.

We can’t forget that stress is one of the things that damage our health the most, and one of the most significant sources of stress nowadays is not having enough money to afford a life. So the less money you have, the more stressed you are, then you get sick, and you need to spend money that you don’t have to get better, but then you get more stressed and even more sick. That’s the story of many people’s lives.