Friday, February 23, 2024

Why is depression and loneliness and big issues in Finland? (Why isn't entrepreneurial thinking more prevalent?)

During my stint as research leader at the University of Helsingfors, I also explored food and health. According to Sanna Marin, Finland is the happiest country on the planet, but according to Finnish-Swedish Children's Rights Days 2023, Finland is the most depressed country in the EU. There are gender differences. Adding to that. Finland has two socio-cultures: the Swedish speaking part that emerged after the viking era and made Finland a modern state, and the Uralic-Finnish speaking part including national romanticism, that slowly spread after Russia's invasion of Sveaborg. According to Finnish research, the Swedish-speaking finns have better health and live longer. 7 pages.

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Why is depression and loneliness and big issues in Finland? - that's an important and complex question.

Recently, I relaunched my role as performance and business coach, including taking pro-bono assignments as a support person.

I'm a psychological scientist currently living in Finland. In 2018, I was invited to become a research-leader at the University of Helsingfors. The research was about the future for Finland's food production from a perspective of Entrepreneurial Thinking, and because the topic was rather complex, the report ended up to include several aspects: how the mind works (chapter 1-3), the climate (chapter 4), the origin of our species (chapter 5), the origin of agriculture (chapter 6), and nutrition (chapter 7) (Österberg, 2021 (In Swedish).

I also wrote a piece about food on my research blog (Österberg, 2019), and after that I was invited to the department of food and nutrition to open that years seminar series for experts on food and nutrition (Österberg, 2020).

That was followed by two popular science articles on food and health (Österberg, 2021, 2022 (both in Swedish)), and a summary about food (Österberg, 2023 (In Swedish).

Because of my role as an expert psychologist, I was assigned to be the department's team leader for mental health issues. The rationale for having that role was that the prevalence of mental health issues at the University of Helsingfors was a staggering ~20%.

Despite having a long experience as a performance and business coach, including digging into nutrition and workplace issues, and spending five years in a research network at Karolinska Institute (Österberg, 2015, 2016 a b, 2017 a b, 2018), the project at the University of Helsingfors opened my eyes about the connection between nutrition and health.

This was partly because the people who recruited me asked me to communicate with the public and organizations. Therefore I conducted more than 20 talks or presentations in Finland between 2018-2022. During those talks and meetings, a recurrent theme was mental health. This became adamant in 2021, during the election to public office in Helsingfors, when I spoke to a number of politicians.

The paradox was that the then Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin stated the following: 
“Finland is the world’s happiest nation – and I want to keep it that way” (Topping, 2021).
But in April of 2023, Finland's institute for health and welfare (THL) as well as the National pension institute (KELA), warned that since 2010, Finnish people’s physical and mental health have deteriorated (HS, 2023). Seven month later, during a Finnish conference called  Finnish-Swedish Children's Rights Days 2023 (Finlandssvenska Barnrättsdagarna 2023), the host said that Finland is the most depressed country in the EU. And soon after, I met people from the Red Cross who were asking for money to support loneliness, which is a serious matter.
“Researchers now know that prolonged loneliness correlates with a range of health problems. Lonely people are at greater risk of stroke, diabetes, dementia, heart disease, and arthritis. They are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression, eating disorders, alcoholism, and sleep deprivation” (Dickinson, 2023)
“The results suggest that lonely individuals may literally view the world in a different way, perhaps finding less value in life moments that non-lonely individuals would enjoy” (Pomeroy, 2023).
It's worth to mentioning that there are differences between males and females; whereas men are more ok with being alone, women in general have a need for social life, such as friends and family (Dunbar, 2021; Pinker,2005).

There's another remark to be made. First, when you think about Finland's socio-culture, you might get it wrong.

After the end of the viking era (~1050), southern Finland became part of the then Swedish kingdom called Svitjod, with the capital Uppsala. It's the same area from which Rurik (830 - 879) was recruited in 862 to rule Novgorod, which later became Russia.

According to oral tradition, Finland's integration to Svitjod (pre-Sweden) started when king Erik (1125- 1160) conducted a supposed crusade, probably to Christianize the pagans who lived in the inland. This was the time when Sweden became at state, probably based on trading. A Swedish king, Gustav Vasa (1996-1560) founded Helsingfors (1550). During the seventeen hundred century, the standard of living doubled. In the eighteen hundred century enlightenment arrived and the kingdom got its first constitution (which is still in use in Finland and Sweden). After more than 60 kings and queens, the Swedish kingdom became one of the most powerful military forces and affluent country on the planet.

In 1808, Russia invaded the Swedish fortress Sveaborg (1748). In order to split the western and eastern part of the Swedish king, they imposed a language that before that hadn't been prevalent - Uralic-Finnish.

That language had until then been spoken by a minority of local tribes, but the trading language around the Gulf of Botnia and the Baltic sea had since the viking era been Swedish.

A movement called the Fennoman movement started, with the purpose of suppressing the enlightenment thinking that made the Eastern part of the Swedish kingdom (Finland) affluent, in favor of national romanticism:
“is the form of nationalism in which the state claims its political legitimacy as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs. This includes such factors as language, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and customs of the nation in its primal sense of those who were born within its culture. It can be applied to ethnic nationalism as well as civic nationalism. Romantic nationalism arose in reaction to dynastic or imperial hegemony, which assessed the legitimacy of the state from the top down” (Wikipedia).
One implication of that is that Finland's Swedish history has been excluded in the school curriculum, creating a new, inaccurate, history of Finland.

But it took time to implement the new language. In 1910, 50 % of the Finns spoke Uralic-Finnish, and this transition is manifested in health studies. According to Finnish tradition, the Swedish speaking Finns are called “better people”, insinuating that their affluence comes at the cost of those who speak Uralic-Finnish. But there's another narrative.

During the 1940s, a Swedish biochemist called Haqvin Malmros (1895-1995) conducted an epidemiological study. Dr. Malmros gathered data from the northern USA, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. He concluded that saturated fat and cholesterol caused Arteriosclerosis, and eventually cardiovascular disease (Malmros, 1950). But looking at Malmros graph, it seems that Finnish people's consumption of total fat hat already decreased since before the start of World war II:


“An american epidemiologist, Dr Ancel Keys, noticed Malmros paper. The following paragraph, first presented in March 1954, is the key evidence in Keys’ early writings showing from where he first “borrowed” the diet-heart and lipid hypotheses:
In view of the obvious importance of the serum cholesterol concentration, it is interesting that this is reduced in populations on short rations and that famine victims almost invariably have very low serum cholesterol concentrations. The fact that atherosclerotic heart disease diminished sharply in many countries on restricted rations during World War II (11-13) is undoubtedly of major significance … whenever a population is faced with a restricted food supply, the character of the diet tends to change even more than its total caloric content. The greatest and most invariable dietary change in famine, and under such conditions as those of World War II (WWII) in much of Europe, is the replacement of fats by carbohydrates (4, 12). (10, my emphasis)
His reference to Haqvin Malmros’ 1950 article (11) is of the greatest historical importance. There, Malmros describes the intellectual foundation of what would become known for generations after as Keys’ diet-heart hypothesis. Malmros wrote:
The consumption of milk and dairy products as well as other foodstuffs rich in cholesterol is very different even under peace conditions in various parts of the world. There should accordingly be less arteriosclerosis among the races that live mainly on a vegetable diet … . Following abundant supply of high cholesterol food there would seem reason to expect an early appearance of atherosclerosis … . If the cholesterol content of food has any significance for the origin and course of arteriosclerotic vascular diseases, the critical years associated with the war ought to be reflected in the mortality curves of certain countries while they should have no effect upon the curves for the countries in which the supply of foodstuffs has been normal. (139-140)” (Noakes, 2019).
Keys is known for launching something called Seven countries study. Finland was one of the countries, and in Finland, most people know about the North Karelia Project. In 2022, Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, bragged about the benefits of the North Karelia Project, including the following phrase:
“From the outset, the goal was to lower cholesterol and blood pressure through dietary changes, including a reduction in the use of butter and salt”.
But after the reports about NKP which happened ~1972, something started to happen in Finland - dementia, including Alzheimer's, became more prevalent. Finland is currently the No 1 Alzheimer's country in the World. As a comparison: Swedish ranks No 10 (Österberg, 2022).

Why?

For some reason, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare forgot to talk about the cohort from Åbo.

Because Finland has two socio-cultures, the Swedish speaking which gave the country all the benefits mentioned above, and the Uralic-Finnish one, imposed by Russia ~1810, the researcher took samples from two places in Finland: typically Swedish speaking Åbo, and typically Uralic-Finnish speaking North Karelia.

And despite eating similar diets, the results between these regions was different. In Karelia, 995 out of 10 000 people died of cardiovascular disease. In Åbo 300 out of 10 000 died of cardiovascular disease (Teicholz, 2014).

During spring of 2023, researchers from Helsingfors city said that Swedish speaking Finns have better health and live longer. Researchers from Åbo Akademi made the same claim later that year.

Ergo. Sanna Marin had a point, but so did the host for Finlandssvenska Barnrättsdagarna 2023. 


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