Y'all know that individual health behaviors - choices around nutrition, exercise, smoking, etc. - only account for about 25% of a person’s health status? The determinants of health are largely social: income and education level, the safety of one’s physical environment (e.g. working conditions, clean water), and degree of social support. Trauma is far worse for health than fast food.

It’s tempting to subscribe to a just world theory, where good things happen to good people (or people who make good decisions), and problems befall problem people, but that just isn’t the world we live in.

Most sick people have spent their lives fighting against oppressive circumstances. They don’t invite illness and hardship with their bad decisions, they are miracles of survival in a sociopolitical environment that’s hostile to their very existence.