What makes us healthy or unhealthy? Is it how many steps we take in a day? Whether we eat enough whole grains or leafy vegetables? Exercise and diet are important, certainly, but much is beyond our control.
This can be simultaneously comforting and worrisome. We benefit from the public health accomplishments of the past, such as vaccines and laws that ensure clean drinking water. Our genes are locked in at conception, of course, and luck — good or bad — can strike anyone. But we also are stuck with the air that we breathe, and, to a dismaying extent, with disadvantages associated with the racial identities and class statuses we’re born with.
Working together, though, we might still be able to tackle problems that are insurmountable as individuals.
There were already plenty of reasons to fight racism and to lift people out of poverty, but perhaps knowing how these societal ills resonate in our bodies can increase the urgency we feel to cure them.
We can also clean the air, and in this issue we explore how we can do that at home and even at work. Outdoor air pollution might be even harder to address, but monitoring is a start.
We’re not saying you should throw away your running shoes or switch to a cookie-dough diet. But as you read these articles, think about the ways in which our health is in our hands.
