Chapter 1

Lecture Notes

So if health and quality of life are really important and meaningful parts of our lives, what can we do to improve them? How can we make our health better? And you can see really clearly in this figure that a large percentage of our health is determined by our behavior. Other big percentages are obviously from our genes, our genetics, you can see here in heredity, but also in our medical care, our social circumstances, and our environmental conditions. Some of those social circumstances and environmental conditions we might have some control over. So if you include those, over half of the relationship between premature death and longevity are due to our behavior, environmental conditions and social circumstances, things that we potentially could have some control over.