Introduction to social determinants of health:
As I christen this blog, I wanted to review the term social determinants of health which is where the idea for this blog sprouted. First, let’s un-jargon this term…social determinants of health means your environment plays a large role and can even dictate your health status. One’s environment includes more obvious elements like your social networks and background, to other less obvious ones like, where you work, or where you play and in which park. All of these factors combine to work towards either promoting your health or act as barriers to a healthful lifestyle. For this blog I hope to review various underrepresented and less talked about issues that go unnoticed. Additionally, 2010 figures reported about 80% of the US lives in cities. This helped me to further hone in on the issue, as I will focus on urban health.