[1] Variations in health outcomes in the United States can be attributed to several social characteristics, such as gender, race, socioeconomic status, the environment, and educational attainment.
Inequalities in these social categories can contribute to health disparities, with minority groups placed at an increased risk for acquiring chronic diseases than others.
The general risk factors associated with these diseases include obesity and poor diet, tobacco and alcohol use, physical inactivity, and access to medical care and health information.
Some commonly cited examples include heavy drinking, illicit drug use, violence, drunk driving, not wearing helmets, and smoking.
In general, women have a higher likelihood of experiencing sexual and intimate partner violence, while men are twice as likely to die from suicide or homicide.
According to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, "among adults with the strongest attachment to the labor force, only 9.6% of women earned more than $50,000 annually, compared with 44.5% of men.
"[7] This gendered economic inequality is partly responsible for the gender-health paradox: the general trend that women live longer than men, but experience a greater degree of non-life-threatening chronic illnesses over the course of a lifetime.
[7] Perpetual states of stress inflict damage on the bodies and minds of women, placing them at risk for physical ailments, such as heart disease and arthritis, as well mental health disorders, such as depression.
Researchers have observed that women openly express feelings of pain, while men are more reserved in this regard and prefer to appear tough even when they experience severe mental or physical suffering.
For instance, research findings suggest that women living in impoverished neighborhoods are more likely to experience obesity, while this effect is not as strong for men.
This effect can be explained by the fact that women spend more time at home than their male counterparts, as a result of higher unemployment rates, and therefore may be more exposed to negative environmental characteristics that take a toll on their health.
Notably, Christy Erving conducted a study in which she examined the gender differences in the health profiles of African Americans and Caribbean blacks (immigrants and U.S. born).
This finding contradicts the gender-health paradox in the sense that researchers would expect morbidity rates to be higher for women, but less of the illnesses that they acquire should be debilitating.
[8] In contrast, the opposite trend is observed for U.S. born Caribbean blacks, with men more likely to experience chronic, life-threatening illnesses than women.
[9] There has been some controversy around "race" being a determinant of disease and health issues, since there are unmeasured forms of background history that are potential factors in this research.
As we know, most of the people living in poverty in the United States are minorities, specifically African Americans, so unfortunately there is no surprise that they are the individuals with so many health issues.
[9] Institutional and cultural racism can even harm minorities health through stereotypes and prejudices, which contributes to socioeconomic mobility and can reduce and limit resources and opportunities required for a healthy lifestyle.
[10][citation needed] Other related metrics can round out this definition; for example, in a 2006 study by authors Cox, McKevitt, Rudd and Wolfe, further categories included "occupation, home and goods ownership, and area-based deprivation indices"[11] in their determination of status.
Income inequality has risen rapidly in the United States, pushing greater amounts of the population into positions of lower socioeconomic status.
[12][citation needed] A study published in 1993 examined Americans who had died between May and August 1960, and paired the mortality information with income, education and occupation data for each person.
[13] The work found an inverse correlation between socioeconomic status and mortality rate, as well as an increasing strength of this pattern and its reflection of the growth of income inequality in the United States.
[13] These findings, although concerned with total mortality of any cause, reflect a similar relationship between socioeconomic status and disease incidence or death in the United States.
While correlating, health and status have arisen in the U.S. from interrelated forces that may intricately accumulate or negate one another due to specific historical contexts.
[15] As this lack of cause and effect simplicity indicates, exactly where disease-related health inequality arises is murky, and multiple factors likely contribute.
Important to an examination of disease and health in the context of a complicated classification like socioeconomic status is the degree to which these measures are tied up with mechanisms that are dependent upon the individual, and those that are regionally variant.
[11] In the aforementioned 2006 study, the authors define individualized factors within three categories, "material (eg, income, possessions, environment), behavioural (eg, diet, smoking, exercise) and psychosocial (eg, perceived inequality, stress)",[11] and provide two categories for external, regionally varying factors, "environmental influences (such as provision of and access to services) and psychosocial influences (such as social support).
Identifying more nuanced and interlocking factors, they cited risk behaviors, early life influences, and access to care as tied to socioeconomic status and thus health inequality.
The decreased amount of healthy food in stores located in low-income areas also contributes to the increased rates of diabetes for persons living in those neighborhoods.
In Jacksonville, Florida it is hard to find groceries stores around the area because it is surrounded by fats, sugar, and high in cholesterol markets.
One of the leading causes of unhealthy eating habits is a lack of access to grocery stores, creating so called "food deserts."