Bill Briggs msnbc.com
Like so many others, I can pin a gloomy personal number on this atrocious economy. But my data point isn’t pulled from a stock portfolio, a credit score or a home budget, although they’re pretty much gasping, too. Nope, this bleak figure comes straight from my medical chart.

Over the past year — while I was trying to save bucks by eating on the cheap — my cholesterol count chugged 46 points higher. Put another way — for roughly every 95 points the Dow dropped since early 2008, my cholesterol gained one point.


Call it Dollar Menu Disease. Or, how the Hamburglar stole my health.

Certainly, I’m not alone in my recession junk food tangent. While Whole Foods is hurting, McDonald’s profits have boomed. Since the start of the slump, doctors have worried that falling incomes and job cuts would damage our health as we lost medical insurance and our anxiety levels spiked.

A new study released Friday from the Harvard School of Public Health found that losing a job can increase the risk of hypertension, heart disease or stroke. For someone who was previously healthy, being laid off increased the odds of developing a stress-related health condition by 83 percent.

“In today’s economy, job loss can happen to anybody,” lead researcher Kate Strully said in the report. “We need to be aware of the health consequences of losing our jobs and do what we can to alleviate the negative effects.”

Health experts also fear hard times could further inflate U.S. waistlines as we seek cheaper foods loaded with fats, calories and sugar. Many studies have directly linked drops in income to increases in obesity.

“It’s kind of a nasty [sign] of trouble to come,” said Susan Moores, a registered dietician in St. Paul, Minn., and msnbc.com contributor. “But I also wonder if all this somehow might get us back to thinking about how we eat, give us a reason to reload and retool what we eat.”

Diet disaster
For me, the cholesterol-busting binge began with a crunch — the financial kind. It wasn’t a total job loss, but I’m a freelance writer and as the market steadily snuffed one paying gig after another, I cut my spending. I sliced my grocery bill in half by dining on a tasty array of hot dogs, grilled-cheese sandwiches, chicken wings, fish sticks and the occasional $2.89 fast food monster meal.

The diet disaster wasn’t immediately obvious. My weight didn’t budge from 185 pounds and I maintained my regular gym habits. But my serum cholesterol, which stood at 180 milligrams per deciliter in January 2008, shot up to 226 by my next checkup in February 2009.

That put me in the “borderline high” cholesterol danger zone between 200 and 239. Doctors recommend a total blood cholesterol below 200 to help protect you against heart disease. A score in the 240-plus range doubles your chance of heart trouble.

Genetics are against me. Both my parents take cholesterol-lowering medications, even though they eat carefully. Yet, given my abrupt blood-chemistry blowout, my doctor believes this deep-fried cholesterol disaster is more about my diet than DNA. In my lab results, my physician, Dr. Judy, included a chart that cross references my cholesterol count with the number of years I’ve been alive — 45. “Your cholesterol ratio says you have a 5 percent chance of having a heart event in the next 10 years. Try to watch the fat in your diet,” Dr. Judy wrote in a letter. “Of course, you can’t do much about your age — except to get older.”

She’s a funny one, that Dr. Judy. But a “heart event?” That’s not an event I plan to attend. Mayor McCheese: Please rip up my RSVP.