Health begins where we live, work, learn, and play — long before we visit the doctor’s office or walk in our local pharmacies. Our health is largely determined by the social, economic, cultural, and physical environments we live in — everything from where we work and live to our level of education and our access to healthy food and water.
These conditions are known as social determinants of health: the social and economic resources — such as housing, education, food access, and transportation — that support health and can determine length and quality of life.Too often, access to these health-determining resources remains outside of individuals’ control. Many health inequities experienced by communities of color, low-income individuals, and other vulnerable populations are due to the lack of appropriate distribution of social resources, rooted in a history of discrimination at the individual, institutional, and structural levels.
These social and economic factors have a significant impact on individual and community-level health. The image below shows a range of factors that impact health:
Origins of good health include factors such as genetic makeup, environmental conditions, nutrition and exercise, access to health care, social support systems, and many others. Some of the factors, such as genetic makeup, are nearly impossible to alter whereas others are amenable to change.
Health risk factors are attributes, characteristics or exposures that increase the likelihood of a person for developing a disease or health disorder. Included here are four types of health factors: health behaviors, clinical care, social and economic, and physical environment factors.
Our health is largely determined by the social, economic, cultural, and physical environments we live in — everything from where we work and live to our level of education and our access to healthy food and water.
Studies indicate that the following five factors make the biggest difference in overall health and wellness: 1) diet; 2) rest; 3) exercise; 4) posture; and 5) avoiding the use of alcohol, drugs and tobacco.
Wellness comprises of eight mutually co-dependence dimensions: emotional, physical, occupational, social, spiritual, intellectual, environmental, and financial. If any one of these dimensions is neglected over time, it will adversely affect one's health, well-being, and quality of life.
In addition to our individual genetics and lifestyle choices, where we are born, grow, live, work and age also have an important influence on our health. Determinants of health are the broad range of personal, social, economic and environmental factors that determine individual and population health.
Why this is important: Unhealthy lifestyle behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, poor diet and lack of exercise are associated with some of the deadliest chronic diseases (e.g., heart disease, stroke and diabetes) as well as poor memory and executive function later in life.
Social, environmental, economic, and genetic factors are seen as contributing to differences in health status and, therefore, as presenting opportunities to intervene.
Cultural health beliefs affect how people think and feel about their health and health problems, when and from whom they seek health care, and how they respond to recommendations for lifestyle change, health-care interventions, and treatment adherence.
Wellbeing is not just the absence of disease or illness. It's a complex combination of a person's physical, mental, emotional and social health factors.
Some grouped the factors influencing health into four principal forces: (1) environment, (2) heredity, (3) lifestyles, and (4) health care services (Blum, 1981).
The four aspects of health are physical, energetic, mental/emotional, and spiritual. These aspects range from the dense physical level to the subtle spiritual level.
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