The medical community has long considered the possibility that an active spiritual life and good health are somehow connected. If early health habits are an indication of future wellness, a recent Gallup Youth Survey (GYS)* may shed some light on that possible connection. GYS findings indicate that teens who tend to be more religious or spiritual are also far more likely to have better health habits. The GYS study did not control for other factors that may affect teens' overall health, such as the level of parents' education or academic and socio-economic status -- surely some or all of those variables play a role in the relationship described here. But those underlying dynamics aside, it does appear that teens who are more religious or spiritual are more likely than their less religious counterparts to have better health habits.
To explore this thesis, Gallup constructed an index of teen health behaviors by dividing teens into four roughly equal groups**: those with good habits (24% of the teens surveyed); those who are neutral in terms of health habits (31%); those with only fair habits (27%); and those with poor habits (17%). By comparing the good habits group to the poor habits group, Gallup found that:
- Teens who describe themselves as religious are more likely to belong to the good habits group (66%) than are teens in the poor habits group (39%).
- Teens with good habits are more likely to believe that "God gives us strength to deal with problems, to call on our God-given resources, and to draw on our inner strength" (64%) than are teens with poor habits (43%).
- Teens in the good habits group are more likely to have attended religious services in the past week (60% compared with 34% of the poor habits group).
- Teens with good habits are also more likely to describe their religious faith as "the most important influence in my life" (41% compared with 23% in the poor habits group).
One survey question addressed the relationship of health to religion directly: "In your opinion, what connection is there between a person's religious or spiritual life and their overall state of health?" Consistent with other findings, teens who see a "strong" or "somewhat strong" connection between religious life and one's overall health are more likely to belong to the good habits group (80%) than they are to the poor habits group (68%).
*Gallup selected items in the recent GYS questionnaire that indicate potential risk factors with regard to one's health. A score of positive one point or negative one point was assigned each time a teen gave certain responses to questions about health habits such as eating well, having checkups, or cigarette smoking. Gallup did not weight particular behaviors in this case -- for example, smoking cigarettes was not rated as "more unhealthy" than a poor diet. All teens surveyed were then arrayed from "high" to "low" based on the number of points they received for various responses.
**Findings are based on telephone interviews with a representative national sample of 501 teens, aged 13 to 17, conducted March through May 2001. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the margin of sampling error is ±5%.
