This is sort of weird. Turns out the healthier your local economy, the more likely you are to die from heart attack. For every one percent reduction in unemployment, deaths from acute myocardial infarction jump 1.3 percent. Relatively speaking, 20-44 year olds see the highest increase, but since they make up such a small percentage of those fatalities anyway, it's really seniors who're dropping in greater numbers. The study points to the byproducts of economic activity: pollution, traffic, and so forth. I'm not sure if they controlled for the possibility that more elderly folks would be working, but it'd seem the sort of thing they'd have thought of. In any case, it does point to a new explanation for the so-called French Paradox, where Frenchies eat a lot of cheese, smoke a lot of cigarettes, drink a lot of wine, and never have heart attacks. Their secret isn't in tannins from the alcohol or reservatol from the fermented grapes, but high rates of societal unemployment.
