“Rich People’s Illness” and “Poor People’s Illness”

Junk food is convenient and cheap, but it’s not good for your health. Vegetables are good for you, but they are getting more and more expensive. Can money buy health? Josei Seven says: Yes – but the rich have their characteristic health problems too, and as to the shrinking middle class, its position between the proverbial rock and the hard place is in some ways the unhealthiest of all.

Postwar Japan prided itself on its large and growing middle class. Everyone can, and soon will be a part of it. The gap between rich and poor will be a thing of the past -- as the past has proved. Unexpectedly, there is still a gap between rich and poor in the future, as it is now showing. There is a growing gap between today’s rich and poor, who eat differently, have different levels of education, and live and work differently. There are many ways to measure health, and the different measures contradict each other, but Katsunori Kondo, a professor of medicine at Chiba University, offers an unusual, if not decisive, measure: low-income people earning less than 2 million yen are two to three times as likely to die as those earning more than 6 million yen.

The key to good health is to eat a balanced diet, but “a balanced diet is not cheap,” Kondo said. And it takes time to do it. Who has the time now? The rich have more time, but even they need to work and have little spare time. But at least they can afford quality food that poor people often cannot. Ready-to-eat substitutes, like instant noodles, snack cakes, and other similar foods, can lead to obesity, with the risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, cerebral hemorrhage and bowel cancer.

Vegetables are important to our body and organs, but less and less appear on the table of the poor. The catastrophic climate has cut the harvest of vegetables, causing vegetable prices to rise. Let’s not mention typhoons this summer, the lack of daylight in Kanto doubled the price of cucumbers. The rich can shrug that off. The poor can’t.