Move to the city and live longer. So suggests Statistics Canada. People who live in Canada’s 25 largest cities can expect to outlive the rest of us by one year. Why? A combination of education, higher income and closeness to a hospital, says a Stats Canada study.
The first inclination was to say it can’t be. Second thoughts were soberer, as the saying goes.
Hark back to 1993, to a study carried out at Saskatoon’s Centre for Agricultural Medicine. Rural people tended to be fatter around the middle than city dwellers, that study told us. Also, rural men did not tend to diet and exercise to lose weight as much as their urban counterparts.
Read Also
Topsy-turvy precipitation this year challenges crop predictions
Rainfall can vary dramatically over a short distance. Precipitation maps can’t catch all the deviations, but they do provide a broad perspective.
Rural women did, though.
One of the authors of the study was quoted as saying that there’s more stress in urban Canada.
That’s arguable, but the key here is probably not how much stress but how that stress is handled. City people have more access to gyms and pools and the like.
Closeness to a hospital? At first I said: “Phooey. I’m half an hour from a hospital. You can be half an hour from a hospital in the city.”
That wasn’t taking into account the fact that, in the city, emergency help could reach me faster and it certainly wasn’t taking into account our rural roads which can be blocked with snow in winter and slick as glare ice in a summer rain. Nor was I taking into account the two-hour ride to the city hospital with its medical specialists and technology.
And, it must be said, living in rural areas, we are exposed to some hazards which our urban counterparts can only dream of: large animals, larger machinery, pesticides, grain dust, gravel roads, distance, isolation.
So I can accept that living in the city could add a year to my life. Will I move tomorrow? Not on your life. I’ve lived in the city and I’ve lived in the country and I’m staying put, thank you very much.
Where I live, when I get up in the morning, I can look south and west and see wide open prairie and I can look west to coulee hills.
I can see magnificent sunrises and sunsets. I can hear birds and crickets and the coyote’s call. Deer feed in the back yard and the cats roam at will.
When I go into town, there are no traffic jams and no long lineups at the grocery store.
All that has to worth at least a year.
