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 Take
a vacation, America. You deserve it!
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You may have heard about the controversial
study released last week in the Journal of the American Medical
Association. It revealed, unambiguously, that Americans are less
healthy than Britons.
In case you haven't heard, the upshot is that non-Hispanic
white Americans, ages 55 to 64, have twice the rate of such chronic
diseases as diabetes and cancer as their British counterparts. Americans
also have higher incidences of hypertension, heart disease, lung
disease, heart attacks and strokes.
Researchers involved in the study said the results
could not be explained by differing rates of smoking, obesity or
alcohol abuse between the two cultures. Nor did they attribute the
disparity to differences between the health-care systems of each
country.
So, then, just what are the underlying reasons for
our comparatively unhealthy conditions? Dr. Michael Marmot, an author
of the report, told The New York Times, "I'm arguing that it's
due to the differences in the circumstances in which people live.
Work, job insecurity, the nature of communities, residential communities
... that's the place we should try to look."
Rest and relaxation
As a corollary to these cultural lifestyle differences, we might
also look at our vacation situations, or "holidays," as
the Brits call them. If work is a primary source of stress, which
in turn is a cause of disease, then vacation would be the antidote
to work-related stress and, by extension, a possible way to prevent
disease.
Ahhhhhhhh, vacation. You know the rare indulgence
of completely relaxing and unwinding that only a vacation can offer.
It takes more than a weekend to achieve that state of bliss: the
ability to sleep soundly rather than fitfully, then awakening to
a beautiful day with no other plans than to sit idly at the beach
under an umbrella and settle into an excellent novel. You might
get up occasionally to walk along the shore and inspect the abandoned
homes of sea creatures. The gliding pelicans and seagulls overhead
give flight to thoughts of going abroad next year to see if the
Riviera is really better. ...
Well, I hate to interrupt the reverie, but compared
to the countries on the other side of the pond, we are a nation
of workaholics. Our productivity rates, those units of output as
measured by the Labor Department, always seem to head upward --
but at what expense?
Between 1970 and 2002, "per capita hours rose
by 20 percent in the U.S.," according to statistics
gathered by the Sloan Work and Family Research Network at Boston
College. That's an extra day's work we're squeezing in for the benefit
of employers between Mondays and Fridays. Another factoid from that
source: "38 percent of Americans say they work more than 45
hours every week versus ... 28 percent of Britons."
So we work long hours. And our vacations? We get shortchanged
-- and in many cases, we cheat ourselves. According to a study
by Expedia last year, Americans get 12 vacation days on average
-- compared to 39 days for the French, 27 days for Germans, 25 days
for the Dutch and 23 days for the Brits. On top of that, Americans
tend to give back an average of three vacation days each year, opting
to pocket the extra money instead.
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