Unhealthy American Culture

This week as I sat in culture and identity class a feeling of anger and helplessness washed over me. This was pretty strange to me because I actually love this class- but what got me was what we were discussing. As we read selections about how culture affects our health and safety I longed to just change American culture altgether, a task much too great for me to complete by myself. You see, we learned abot a small self sufficient town in Pennsylvania that was founded by Italian immigrants and modeled exactly as their home town in Italy was.Over the years doctors discovered that the rate of heart disease in this town was greatly lower than in the rest of America, and the only difffernetial factor was the light hearted culture, not diet or exercise. This clearly shows that in America our ideal of health is certainly skewed. We simply have way too much stress! And honeslty who likes stress? I certainly don't, but in America there is virtually no way to be successful in life without tons of stress. Basically I just wish that our culture was not so centered on efficiency and convenience and time, because if It wasn't, we'd all likely be much healthier.