Money and education confer plenty
of advantages in life, and research has long shown that people who have them
live healthier, longer lives and tend to have more stable, less-monotonous
jobs. But they also report feeling a lot more stress at work than people with
lower salaries and fewer degrees. To measure stress levels during the work day,
researchers gave 122 workers living in a northeast US city Palm Pilots to carry
with them on the job. Several times a day, the handheld computers prompted them
to rate how stressed and how happy they felt. The idea was to measure stress in
real time, rather than ask people at the end of the day, when other factors
such as commutes or family obligations might influence their stress levels. People
with higher incomes and levels of education reported being about 28% more
stressed and 8.3% less happy overall than workers with lower incomes and levels
of education did. In addition to reporting being more stressed and less happy
from moment to moment, those higher-status workers – that is, those in the top
fifth of a combined measure of income and education, tending to earn at least
$100,000 a year – also reported having more trouble meeting the demands of
their jobs. These individuals who report higher stress are probably individuals
who simply have more authority or decision making duties than others. The study’s
results certainly don’t mean low status workers have it easier. Obviously, low
status jobs can create all sorts of problems for workers, such as making it
more difficult for them to pay bills. Even though that’s caused by work, maybe
it’s a stressor you can leave behind for the moment when you get to work. Researchers
also found in a 2014 study that people with lower incomes tended to report more
stress at home than at work – the opposite of what higher income people
reported. Stress and happiness are also pretty subjective feelings, and people
express their moods and deal with stress in different ways. Could it be that
higher status people are just more likely to whine when things don’t go their way?
More research is needed, but the study contains a clue: In addition to
answering questions the subjects also submitted saliva so their tem could measure
their levels of the stress related hormone, cortisol – an those levels didn’t
indicate significantly more stress among better paid workers.
Friday, 21 October 2016
Calcium Supplements Bad For Heart
Taking calcium in the form of
supplements may raise the risk of heart damage and plaque buildup in arteries. A
diet high in calcium rich foods, however, is safe and would not affect the
heart. After analyzing 10 years of medical tests on more than 2,700 people, the
results add to growing scientific concerns about the potential harms of
supplement. This study adds to the body of evidence that excess calcium in the
form of supplements may harm the heart and vascular system. Previous studies have
shown that “ingested calcium supplements – particularly in older people – do not
make it to the skeleton or get completely excreted in the urine, so they must
be accumulating in the body’s tissues. The researchers claimed that as a person
ages, calcium-based plaque builds up in the body’s main blood vessel, the aorta
and other arteries, impeding blood flow and increasing the risk of heart
attack. The study focused on 2,742 participants who answered a 120-part questionnaire
about their dietary habits and underwent two CT scans spanning 10 years apart. The
participants chosen for this study ranged in age from 45 to 84 years, of whom
51 percent were female. Those who ate more than 1,400 milligrams of calcium a
day were 27 percent less likely to have this buildup than the others, the team
found. But when they looked at the source of calcium, they found those who took
supplements were more likely to develop the blockages.
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