The Biff Tannen Continuum: It's hip to be square

If you spent your high school years putting up with econ class wedgies and ritualized towel snapping in the locker room, you may be in luck later in life. A new study out of Wisconsin (cheese capital of the United States) published in The Journal of Health and Social Behavior (which features a disappointing lack of information about cheese), shows that a stronger academic record as a teenager can equate to a longer, healthier life. From The New York Times:

The findings come from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which has been following more than 10,000 people who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. Those students who finished in the top 25 percent of their high school class were healthier, decades later, than the ones who finished in the bottom quarter. When they were all in their early 60s, those who had finished in the top quartile were, over all, half as likely to have experienced the declines in health that their peers who graduated in the lowest quartile were experiencing. Asked to assess their health on a scale from ”excellent” to “poor,” the top students ranked their overall health higher, and they were only half as likely to report having a chronic ailment like diabetes, heart disease or respiratory illness.

Why this is the case isn't exactly clear, although the article suggests two possible reasons. One is that people with better grades get better opportunities and better jobs, so their standard of living, including access to health care, increases.

A second theory is that smarter people are, essentially, smarter people, so they're more inclined to make smarter choices later in life, once their mothers stop dressing them and cruel cheerleaders stop mocking the genetically-acquired over-pronation that causes them to walk like a duck.

Not that I'm bitter.

All this said, clearly the Wisconsin cheese scientists missed the real reason nerds live longer. Maybe if they spent a little less time reading the Scientific Journal of Scientific Science or whatever and a little more time absorbing media that can actually teach them some real science - namely the Back to the Future trilogy - they'd be aware of my highly-praised, revered, respected - and very sciency - theory, The Biff Tannen Continuum.

Of course, you all recall Biff as Marty McFly's nemesis from the series. He was the popular, fit, teenage bully who, provided time and space were properly aligned, grew old, dumpy and pathetic and probably would have had a stroke somewhere in the second act of Back to the Future 5, had this epic series been allowed to live its natural life.

With this in mind, my theory stipulates that if high school wasn't four years of daily, hellish torment for you, you might be prone to look to them as "glory days" and, subconsciously deciding it's all downhill from age 19 on, you let yourself go. That, I believe, is the primary reason the Wisconsin study played out as it did.

Of course, there are ways to prevent The Biff Tannen Continuum, but they require a Delorean DMC-12 equipped with a Flux Capacitor and/or a Grays Sports Almanac. Sadly, you'll never have access to these three thing because they are in the providence of us long-livin' nerds.

Sorry, pal. You shouldn't have snapped me with that towel after third period P.E.

You know who you are.