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Good News…continued

But it isn’t simply that people showing up for church are healthier; they also are more likely to improve their health habits. When compared with nonweekly attendance, “weekly attendance was associated with a statistically significant improvement in quitting smoking, becoming often physically active, becoming not depressed, increasing the number of individual personal relationships and getting married,” said one of the examined articles, which was published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine in 2001. That study gathered health and mortality data over a period of 30 years on 2,676 Californians, 26% of whom attended religious services weekly.

Lynda Powell, MD, a professor of preventive medicine at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center, says that a continuing study of hers is suggesting that the mechanism contributing to the better health of church goers might be the practice of turning to prayer or meditation in moments of anger and distress, thereby diminishing the harmful effect of negative emotion. She tells of a Sikh cab driver who told her that any time another driver cuts him off, he reaches for his prayer beads. In doing so, he told her, “I feel closer to God.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal/By Kevin Helliker