days—as in concrete, measurable factors like darkness, cold, and home damage[*]—the more their kids’ physiology was marked by that adversity even near puberty. (The participants were of a similar socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic background, and lived in the same suburban area.) “Over the years [of tracking the children],” Suzanne King, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University said, “we found that that objective stress explained how kids varied one from another in a whole host of things: language, BMI [body mass index] and obesity, insulin secretion, their immune system.”[6] Even IQ
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