★Social and economic inequalities are visible everywhere and have enormous effects on health, but little is done to mitigate them. This book is a first response to the marks that inequities leave on people’s bodies.
★English sample available.

We are living longer and longer, but not with the same level of health. When we talk about inequality, we mainly focus on biographical aspects such as educational qualification, work or income; in short, economic capital, social capital and cultural capital, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called them. The life course of each individual, however, is the result not only of his biography, but also of the marks that this biography leaves on his or her body.

Today we know many of these biological imprints – chronic stress response mechanisms, reduced immune function, processes of physiological wear and tear, epigenetic modifications – but the process that translates social phenomena into biological phenomena remains an underexplored continent. Biological Capital is a journey into the health consequences of social and economic inequalities, straddling biology, epidemiology, medicine, sociology, and anthropology. Understanding the importance and functioning of our biological capital is in fact the first step in demonstrating that healthy aging is a possible goal for everyone.

Luca Carra is a science journalist specialized in environment and health, and teaches at Bicocca University (Milan) and SISSA (Trieste). He has collaborated with numerous Italian newspapers and magazines, and published several books.

Paolo Vineis is full professor of Environmental Epidemiology at Imperial College London. His research focuses on environmental and molecular epidemiology and has more than a thousand publications to his credit in journals such as “Nature,” “Science” and “The Lancet” and published several books. For Codice edizioni he has already published Equivoci bioetici (2006), Lost in translation (2011) and Salute a tutti i costi (2021, new revised edition).