The Roseto Effect

We begin by addressing a question from Sarah about hypnosis. Then we dive deep into our main topic. Roseto, Pennsylvania was founded by Italian immigrants to America in 1912, and it ended up providing something of a mystery for the medical field in the mid-1950s and 1960s because, despite the fact that they did everything wrong from the perspective of modern medicine in terms of eating properly and taking care of themselves, the entire town managed to have the lowest rate of heart disease and heart attacks of any town in the nation. This happened at time when heart attacks were the #1 killers in the country each year. When researchers investigated, they found that it was the community-driven mindset of the residents themselves that produced this and other remarkable medical results. That drives the conversation among the three of us on today’s show. After asking all of the 1,600 residents of the small town hundreds of questions each on topics regarding diet, lifestyle, exercise, career, etc., researchers from the University of Oklahoma concluded that their remarkable health was due primarily to having retained their old-world cultural values of community and cooperation. This happened despite the fact that they ate high-carb, high-cholesterol, high-fat diets, smoked cigars, drank sometimes to excess, worked high-stress jobs, and basically did everything “wrong” from the modern perspective!