Health
The Kuna have been shown to have a low average blood pressure (BP, 110/70 mm Hg), and, do not experience the age-related increase in blood pressure that is common in Western society (Hollenberg et al. 1997). More importantly, death rates from cardiovascular disease and cancer, the #1 and #2 causes of death in the US are rare in the Kuna. Between 2000 to 2004, on the mainland of Panama, Bayard et al. (2007) reported that for every 100,000 residents, 83 died from cardiovascular disease (CVD), and 68 died from cancer. In contrast, per 100,000 Kuna, these death rates were 9 for CVD and 4 for cancer. One possible explanation for the improved health of the Kuna, relative to their mainland Panamanian counterparts is that the Kuna drink 30-40 oz. of flavanol-rich cocoa per day (http://voices.yahoo.com/kuna-cocoa-optimal-way-decrease-blood-pressure-11583580.html?cat=70).
Read more about this topic: Kuna People
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“In the continual enterprise of trying to guide appropriately, renegotiate with, listen to and just generally coexist with our teenage children, we ourselves are changed. We learn even more clearly what our base-line virtues are. We listen to our teenagers and change our minds about some things, stretching our own limits. We learn our own capacity for flexibility, firmness and endurance.”
—Jean Jacobs Speizer. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Collective, ch. 4 (1978)
“However strongly they resist it, our kids have to learn that as adults we need the companionship and love of other adults. The more direct we are about our needs, the easier it may be for our children to accept those needs. Their jealousy may come from a fear that if we adults love each other we might not have any left for them. We have to let them know that it’s a different kind of love.”
—Ruth Davidson Bell. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 3 (1978)
“O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)