Low-income people are physiologically different than high-income people

“So low-income people in this country are basically juggling a whole bunch of balls simultaneously. The result of that constant juggling is stress. These communities were “incubators of chronic stress,” he said in a TEDx talk. “Low-income people are physiologically different than high-income people. Not because they were born that way, but because we made them that way.” There’s a well-established link between chronic stress and a variety of health problems, among them cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and inflammation. And that’s why the health care system was so poorly positioned to close the gap. The problem was not the lack of treatment. It was the lack of health. 

Excerpt From: Dan Heath. “Upstream.”