Living in cities has been an important form of evolution for the Earth’s inhabitants, but now researchers are starting to highlight a series of surprising ways in which urban lifestyle significantly affects health.
If, in the past, people felt that the urban population is experiencing greater life expectancy through increased quality of life, medical statistics now show that those who live in urban areas become more often ill with chronic diseases (autoimmune diseases, mental disorders, arthritis, heart disease, cancer or infertility) than people in rural areas.
Urban pollution and child health
Researchers at the Granada University in Spain have found that babies born in cities are bigger and weigh more than those in rural areas, which may sound encouraging. However, plaque analyzes conducted on women in urban and rural environments show that the those living in big cities have a much higher level of chemical pollutants (called xenoestrogens) in the blood, thus exposing their babies to many health problems.
Xenoestrogens, in addition to causing excessive fetal development inside the womb, may increase susceptibility to obesity, hyperactivity, early puberty, fertility problems, and lung, breast or prostate cancer.
Another negative consequence of urban lifestyle, which affects children’s growth and development, is the fact that they mostly stay indoors. Children who spend most of their time at home are at greater risk of myopia and other visual disturbances that can get worse as they get older. Researchers have found that this is linked to the insufficient exposure to the sun, which causes the retina to secrete dopamine, a hormone that inhibits the development of the eyeball.
Urban lifestyle and longevity
A study conducted by the Max Planck Institute has found that birds’ breeding periods are more frequent in urban areas than in rural areas. Responsible for this phenomenon is the increased brightness during night time: just one-third of the intensity of the night lights in most cities is enough to make birds reproduce earlier.
The greater amount of light that people in urban cities are exposed to reduces the level of melatonin, the sleep hormone, also causing the number of free radicals in the body to increase. These molecules are known to speed up the natural process of aging.
Anxiety
Researchers at the University of Heidelberg state that they can recognize the environment in which a person lives, measuring his anxiety level. Rural residents are less anxious than those in urban areas, as the brain’s stress-causing region is almost inactive for them. On the other hand, people who lead an urban lifestyle are exposed daily to anxiety stimuli, such as performance pressure, strong noise or the need to handle difficult social situations.
Carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide, mostly emitted by cars, has two opposite and surprising effects. On one hand, researchers at the Tel Aviv University say that the odorless gas can neutralize the level of stress caused by noise in big cities. Very low levels of carbon monoxide inhaled by the volunteers of a research have proven effective in inducing a state of calm during exposure to strong auditory pollution.
On the other hand, inhaling large amounts of carbon monoxide is responsible for producing hundreds of accidental deaths each year.
Nowadays, more than half of Earth’s population lives in urban cities. Unfortunately, due to increasing pollution and the effects of global warming, the urban life is starting to have visible damaging effects on our health and longevity. Many people now believe that city life can “drive us crazy” — and they might be true.
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