Single? It might be unhealthy for you !

Ever seen a friend who lives alone with smoke filled compartments and vapored windows? It is not your imagination that you see single men and women who don’t seem to care about their health!! Obviously there is no one to influence their health with the love and care.

Men who don’t live with a mate are most likely to believe they can influence their own health, a large study in Sweden has concluded. Researchers studied 28,198 men and women between the ages of 18 and 80 to find out whether they possessed a social factor called “internal health locus control’’ which essentially means a belief that your behaviour influences your health. They found 33.7 per cent of the men and 31.8 per cent of the women lacked internal health locus of control.

Living alone, single men were the least likely to believe they could influence their own health through things like eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, not smoking and keeping alcohol consumption under control. Widows, men and women, also scored fairly low on the tests.

In an interview, a professor of social medicine at Lund University in Malmo, Sweden, Martin Lindstrom, quoted that marital status affects health locus of control. He firmly believes that this finding is important for policy makers as they design messages to promote healthy behaviour in single men. While the study was conducted in a Swedish population, it may be applicable to India. He added, “health promotion should particularly consider some marital status groups. “