A couple of months ago, I watched a video entitled "Place Matters". I wanted to share some information from the video. Here is just a collection of statements from researchers and policy analysts about how where one lives is the greatest predictor of their health. This includes financial, emotional, and physical health.
JAMES KRIEGER (Epidemiologist, Seattle Dept. of Public Health): Place matters. That’s where someone works, where they go to school, or where they live, because place determines what someone’s exposed to in terms of a whole host of factors that can affect their health. So place matters because it determines what kind of physical or chemical agents you might be exposed to. It matters what kind of social environment you are exposed to. It matters if there’s a lot of violence or crime in your neighborhood. It matters if it’s easy to go for a walk in your neighborhood or find healthy foods. Who your neighbors are and the way you interact with your neighbors can also affect your health. Place ultimately is a critical determinant of health.
DAVID WILLIAMS (Sociologist, Harvard School of Public Health): When we think about health, we usually think about health care and access to care and the quality of care. But what research clearly shows is that health is embedded in the larger conditions in which we live and work. So, the quality of housing and the quality of neighborhood have dramatic effects on health. Sometimes, we naively think of improving health by simply changing behaviors. But the choices of individuals are often limited by the environments in which they live.
ANA DIEZ-ROUX (Epidemiologist, University of Michigan): When most people think of the causes of chronic disease, for example cardiovascular disease, they think of individual level risk factors which we know about: diet, physical activity, smoking. However, it’s also true that they are socially patterned. And one of the dimensions across which it’s patterned is by neighborhoods. If we look at a map of almost any geographic area and you map up rates of obesity, for example, or of hypertension, or of low-birth weight, we’ll see that these things overlap almost exactly. And if we overlay a map of environmental hazards, it fits in as well. And, it’s very common to see all these dimensions cluster.
DICK JACKSON (Professor of Environmental Health, UC Berkeley): A friend of mine said that she’d seen 10 or 12 teenage girls now who have had their gall bladders removed. If you eat a lot of fat in your diet, you can get gall bladder disease and it turned out that they’re eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in fast food outlets. And there were no farmers markets, there were no green grocers; there was no Safeway or supermarket that was reachable by these kids. And fast food is a bargain. You can get 1500 calories for a couple of bucks. It’s not a long-term bargain, but it’s a short-term bargain. And people make that trade.
ANGELA GLOVER BLACKWELL (CEO, PolicyLink): We had vast public investments in building the suburbs of America. Federally supported loans, FHA loans, went to people who were moving to the suburbs and for many years, up until the 1960s, those loans were available on a racially restricted basis. African-Americans and other people of color didn’t have access to them.
A concluding statement from David Williams of the Harvard School of Public Health: What all of this means is that housing policy is health policy. Educational policy is health policy. Anti-violence policy is health policy. Neighborhood improvement policies are health policies. Everything that we can do to improve the quality of life of individuals in our society has an impact on their health and is a health policy.
