The link is a correlation, not a cause. The wealthy get diabetes too. The most wealthy man I know has type 2 diabetes. Wealth and health don’t always go together, especially if being wealthy leads to eating too much.

Also, you can certainly be healthy without being rich. Speaking of a $2 billion residential wellness community for the wealthy called Cooper Life at Craig Ranch, Dr. David Satcher, a former surgeon general, says that while he supported anything that furthers wellness, he also cautioned, “I don’t want people to think you need that kind of money to invest to adopt a healthy lifestyle.”

Karen agrees. “A more precise statement of the relationship between health and wealth might be that health is a form of wealth. I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Satcher that it’s an incorrect assumption that one must have wealth to attain health.”

Good health increases your potential to do what you want to do, Karen says. Just like having money does.

Like with our diet, the moral way of life has to be moderate. When we have too much, we can leave too big a footprint on this Earth. Unless we live simply, other simply can’t live.

But when we have too little, it’s too hard to take care of our health. Our bodies are our temples and our only permanent possessions. In our civilization the moral life has to provide enough money for us to maintain the health of the only thing that we truly have.