"Community Conditions" and How They Influence Your Ability to Make Healthy Choices

Have you ever tried to walk somewhere only to find out the sidewalk doesn't connect? Or isn't in the best shape? Or isn't there at all!? 

Have you ever been looking for a "healthy option" at your favorite restaurant and couldn't find any of them labeled? Then you chose the cobb salad because you thought, "well, there's lettuce, so its gotta be close," only to find out later it had more calories and fat than the cheeseburger? 

Have you quit smoking because you couldn't smoke inside your favorite bar or restaurant anymore and had to go out in the cold? How inconvenient!

These are all examples of how "community conditions" influence your ability to make healthy decisions for yourself. re:TH!NK's partners have been working over the last seven years to try to create an environment that enables healthy choices (its part of our mission statement). And that's REALLY important to understand in our work, in public health. 

Sometimes, the environment makes it easy to make healthy choices, like for example, the state smoke-free air law. Hundreds of people quit smoking because it just became too difficult to keep smoking. A big win for public health and the health of every one of those quitters!

However, sometimes its hard for people to make healthy choices because they aren't able to find them, or they don't exist at all. Individual responsibility for making healthy choices is only half of the picture. 

The conditions of our surroundings (our environment) is the other half. How we are able to interact with where we live impacts which healthy choices we can make, or what choices are even available. 

That's why we're trying to re-frame the conversation about the health of our communities from a portrait to a landscape. By seeing the whole picture, not just the people in the picture, we can work together to make it easier for people to make healthy choices.