Deb and Maria are the same age, each has two kids, and they live just a few miles apart. Deb, however, will live, on average, 15 years longer than Maria. This public service video from The California Endowment — narrated by George Takei — explains the discrepancy:
What determines how long we live? The surprising thing to us was that adjacent communities can have a 15 year-difference in life expectancy.
Your preconditioned brains might attribute this to dramatic factors like drugs and violence (ours did).
But the causes are actually more sinister: heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, all of which can be linked to Chronic Stress and stem directly from economic inequality. So we are all implicated… and we hope you learn as much from this 4-minute video as we did in the 15 years it took us to make it.