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Lecture Notes

Environmental health is the final dimension of health in our contemporary view of health as wellness, and this is probably the broadest of all the dimensions of health. It includes many things in the world around us. Two examples that are pictured here; one, the physical environment. The air we breathe in is one example of the environment that affects our health around us. So in the picture you see a young man riding his bicycle along the street, and the air is just filled with smog and pollution. Obviously that's not a very positive physical environment for your health. The other example shows a map of the United States, and it shows how the smoking policies, state by state, have affected smoking in each of those states, and clearly policies have an impact—policies in our environment around us have an impact—on our health, and in particular policies about health such as smoking.