Poverty is more than lack of money: poverty changes the chemical makeup of the human body. This is the conclusion reached by evolutionary scientists in Finland and Great Britain. New data are constantly emerging on the impact of poverty on the human brain and on the entire body. Various factors influencing poverty have one thing in common: they all complicate a person's escape from poverty.
Poor people, on average, get sick more and die earlier than people with good earnings. According to a 2016 study by the Finnish Health and Social Development Agency (THL), the difference in life expectancy between the poorest and richest Finns is 5.6 years for women and as much as 10.6 years for men.
“In London, the difference in life expectancy could be 20 years - just based on the postcode,” says Emma Vitikainen, assistant professor and evolutionary biologist at the University of Helsinki. In her research, she studied the effect of financial condition on the human body.
Part of the difference can be attributed to lifestyle. Poor populations in Finland and the UK generally eat less healthy food, exercise less, gain more weight, drink more alcohol, and smoke more than wealthier populations, according to the study. Poor groups of the population also, on average, behave more impulsively and take risks more often than well-earners.
If you get sick and die early, it is your own fault, many will think.
Certain risk factors that increase the likelihood of financial difficulties in a person's life can accumulate and be inherited.
To study this aspect, a research group of the University of Turku and the Finnish Health and Social Development Authority studied data from 157 thousand Finns. According to the results published in 2017, lack of education of parents can portend the lack of education of children, and unemployment of parents can translate into unemployment of children. The most serious reason for this was that people are living on benefits and getting used to this kind of life.
“The researchers' findings were sorted into headlines and comments that talked about a 'culture of poverty' and stressed that the poor state of affairs depends on ourselves,” says Vitikainen.
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However, poverty is not associated with weakness or poor self-discipline. New data are constantly emerging on the impact of poverty on the human brain and on the entire body. Various factors influencing poverty have one thing in common: they all complicate a person's escape from poverty.
“People probably do not know or do not understand how much poverty affects us biologically,” Vitikainen said.
University of Warwick researcher Anandi Mani, along with her American and Canadian colleagues, reported in Science in 2013 that a lack of money is negatively affecting brain function.
This information was confirmed when Mani, along with a group, invited 400 American volunteers to take a test to determine intelligence. Some of the subjects were poorer than the average, some were richer than the average.
The researchers aroused monetary concerns in test subjects in a rather subtle way: the researchers asked what the subjects would do if their car broke down. Would they be able to send the car for repair right away? Would you have to take a loan for repairs or not?
Some subjects were told that the renovation would cost about one hundred euros, while others were told the cost was ten times that.
When it comes to a small amount, the poor and the high-income earners performed equally well on the intelligence test. If a huge bill was "billed" for repairs, the scores of poorer people in the test fell. The level of intelligence decreased by 13 points on the test - comparable to the effect of a sleepless night. Expensive car repairs did not affect the results of rich people.
This experiment shows how thinking about monetary difficulties affects a person's intellectual ability. Thinking about financial hardship puts a strain on the brain in such a way that processing other information suffers, the researchers said.
Mani and colleagues have shown that this phenomenon can be observed in everyday situations. As subjects, they took Indian farmers who received income from their crops only once a year. Researchers studied the cognitive abilities of Indians before and after harvest.
It turned out that farmers who had not yet received the money performed less well in tests than those who had already received it. Farmers' nutrition and the amount of physical labor did not substantiate the differences.
The bad situation and the concern for survival literally devour the person from the inside. Stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol are produced more actively. If the feeling of insecurity persists, the body is in an anxious state all the time. The body is awake at night and becomes prone to depression and apathy.
Chronic stress reduces the number of neural connections in the prefrontal cortex, which in turn impairs the ability to think logically. The constant release of cortisol depletes the cells of the hippocampus.
Prolonged stress depletes the immune system and increases the likelihood of disease. Blood pressure remains high, which increases the risk of heart disease. Stress hormones can alter metabolism, make a person fuller, and cause diabetes.
Long periods of stress accelerate the aging process. Stress depletes telomeres, the terminal protective areas of chromosomes. For poor people, they are shorter than for people who do not live in cramped circumstances. These differences are already noticeable in childhood.
Daniel Nettle, professor of psychology at Newcastle University in Britain, noted with colleagues that starlings who are forced to fight for food at a young age grow up to be more impulsive than starlings raised with enough food. Birds raised in constraints were not able to choose as healthy food as the birds that received it in the first place. In addition, their chromosome-protecting telomeres were shorter.
The combination of impulsive behavior and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is common in people with short telomeres.
"Until recently, researchers explained this connection in such a way that an innate impulsive nature could lead to the emergence of bad habits - for example, smoking, which can shorten telomeres," says evolutionary biologist Emma Vitikainen. - What if the causal relationship looks very different? What if telomeres that get shorter with poverty and stress lead to impulsive behavior?
Nettle and colleagues published their research on this topic in January 2018. The group was unable to confirm that smoking shortens telomeres. However, people with short telomeres were indeed more likely to smoke.
Poor socioeconomic conditions, deprivation and violence experienced in childhood accelerate the onset of adolescence. A similar phenomenon was noted in animals.
Here we can talk about the so-called strategy "live fast, die young", says Vitikainen.
“If resources are limited, the animal can use energy either to repair cells and maintain its condition, or to reproduce. You cannot get everything at the same time."
If conditions are unstable and unsafe and there is a lot of stress, it is evolutionarily more reasonable to reproduce at an early age.
"In other words, if a girl thinks that there are no good fathers in our world, then you shouldn't wait long, you need to have children as soon as possible."
Vitikainen emphasizes that such a strategy is not deliberate.
“It has to do with biological mechanisms that have evolved over millions of years. This does not mean that in modern conditions this decision would be good or correct. Biological and social evolution are often in conflict with each other."
Genes and the environment are closely intertwined, but they cannot be separated from each other. The genome decides how a particular situation will affect different people, and the environment decides how genes will behave in different situations.
Formation begins already in the womb.
If the mother does not eat well, the embryo's genes develop abnormally. The body perceives the situation in such a way that the child is born into a world in which there is a shortage of food.
Researchers have found numerous genes that are muted in low-birth-weight infants. These genes are involved in many tasks, from growth to metabolism. As a result, these children begin to gain fat faster than usual.
The mother's stress also “informs” the child that he is being born in dangerous conditions for him. It is important to be constantly alert. If during pregnancy the content of stress hormones was very high, this begins to affect the nerve cells, and later on the formation of the central nervous system.
Excessive production of cortisol affects the systems that are responsible for emotions and stress. Professor of psychology at the University of Helsinki, Katri Räikkönen, together with the research group, noticed that the children of women exposed to stress or depression during pregnancy, on average, differ from other children in greater tearfulness and shyness. The link between the stress during pregnancy of the mother and the temperament of the baby was also noticeable at age five.
According to some results, children of mothers who experienced severe stress during pregnancy have slightly lower IQ than others.
“The so-called poor person constantly explains that he does not have funds for this or that, that the money is constantly running out, the salary is not enough for normal food. And yet such a person always has money for chips, cola and, above all, for cigarettes and beer. " ("Wow", 2014-05-01)
What we experience under stress and how our body reacts to stress depends on our genes and environmental conditions. Some people have a better brain coping with stress than others.
Although these characteristics begin to form in utero, the most important are the early years of a child's life. Cornered by poverty, severely depressed or depressed, parents may simply not be able to give their baby parental love. This only adds to the stress on the child's emotional system, which is already tender and vulnerable.
Fortunately, the “settings” can be changed if the child's growing environment improves.
“Of course, the responsibility of a person for his choice is always emphasized, but it is still important to understand that not everything is in our hands. We are not a tabula rasa, our environment has a significant impact on us - even before birth,”says Vitikainen.
“On the other hand, it is for this reason that the situation can be changed. The biological effects of inequality can be counterbalanced if there is political will, desire, and the capacity for empathy.”
It is known that early education and support for families with young children can be critical to child development. This is due to the fact that the brain of young children is very flexible.
“Women's counseling and other types of support can affect human health for decades to come and have a significant impact on the mind. The consequences extend to future generations.”
Kirsi Heikkinen