Love is good for almost everything

The power of love to keep us well comes from a study showing that health suffers after a divorce or when one spouse dies. The researchers found that being single after being married brings about a decline on physical health. The divorced and widowed in the study had 20 percent more health problems such as heart disease and diabetes than mid-life couples who remained married to their first spouse.

Even worse, the positive health benefits of marriage were cancelled out for the divorced and widowed people in the study: they had worse health problems than men and women who had never been married.

Here are some startling statistics illustrating how vital love is to our mental as well as physical well-being: rates of major depression are nine times higher in unmarried men; divorce or separation more than doubles the risk of suicide in men; married men and women drink less alcohol and use less marijuana and cocaine than the unmarried; 70 percent of chronic drinkers were divorced or separated - only 15 percent were married.

So there you have it, love is good for almost everything. The only exception: it doesn’t help you lose weight.

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