In the 1950s, a team of researchers led by Dr. Stewart Wolf studied the small town in the hills of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Roseto was an anomaly in America as no one under 55 had died from a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease. The local death rate for men over 65 was half the national average.
Wolf was taken aback. This was the 1950s, years before the advent of cholesterol-lowering drugs and aggressive measures to prevent heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease.
Wolf and his team decided to investigate. Data was gathered from death certificates, physician records, blood drawls, EKGs, diet, family history, and exercise habits. When comparing this data with other towns in America there were no differences. Roseto was made up of Italian immigrants who worked in factories, smoked unfiltered cigars, suffered from obesity, and had traditional Italian dinners much like hundreds of other towns across America. How is this possible? Were residents of Roseto drinking from a fountain of youth?
There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it.
Wolf and his team discovered that the answer didn’t lie in the Rosetan diet, exercise, genes, or location. The answer was Roseto itself.
They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty- two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures…the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
Wolf and his team faced criticism when they presented their findings to the medical community. They argued against those that were focused on complex charts, genes, individual choices, and physiological processes instead of looking beyond the individual. Wolf had to convince them to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.
Eventually, the multi family homes broke up, expensive cars & swimming pools were purchased, and over the next two decades, Roseto caught up with the rest of America. In 1971, the first resident under the age of 55 died from a heart attack and by the 1980s, the rate of fatal heart attacks was the same as the national average.
- MELINK
Inspired by Malcom Gladwell.
Gladwell, Malcolm, 1963- author. Outliers : the Story of Success. New York :Little, Brown and Company, 2008.