Originally published July 11 2005
Early relationships influence later health
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
AZcentral.com reports that your health later in life can be greatly influenced by the people you live with, and whether you are single, married, divorced or widowed. Experts suggest that married couples live healthier lives due to less stress and shared responsibilities.
Whom you live with and whether you're single, married, divorced or widowed can offer clues to your health decades later, studies suggest.
Research comparing the health and well-being of varied states of pairings and singledom suggests that living with aging parents or grandchildren takes a toll on adults' health.
And the research shows that any disruption to marriage, such as divorce or a spouse's death, can have repercussions years later.
"Talk about a scar on people's health," sociologist Linda Waite of the University of Chicago told about 1,700 marital therapists, marriage educators and others at the ninth annual Smart Marriages conference, which wrapped up here Sunday.
She says marriage's benefits derive from social connection, risk sharing, specialization of household tasks and economies of scale.
Waite is among researchers who offered new findings about relationships to an audience made up largely of those who help couples through trying times.
Couples who live alone or with their own children have equal health advantages.
But couples or singles living with parents or grandkids show damaging effects on physical, emotional and cognitive health.
She says researchers presume the stress of caregiving is responsible for the effects, but more research is needed.
But a happy remarriage offers about the same health benefits as an undisrupted one, she says.
Seattle researcher John Gottman also put a new twist on findings from his largely academic 2002 book, "The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models."
In it, Gottman outlines how, using interviews, videotapes, questionnaires and physiological monitoring, researchers can score and graph data according to mathematical models to predict whether couples will stay together or split up.
Now the mathematician and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington is writing a new book "explaining his idea to the masses.
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