Topics for our times: public health--community or commodity? Reflections on healthy communities.

Salt Consumption: Reflections on Public Health

The ancestors of humans ate a diet that contained less than 0.5 g of salt per day (equivalent to 0.2 g sodium/day) during million years of evolution. The human body is therefore genetically programed to this amount of salt [1]. Currently, mean daily salt intake levels are 7-13 g, varying by region and population group [2]. Studies have also reported higher rates in several Asian countries [3], ...

Reflections Knowledge: economy or community?

At the end of World War II, Western civilisation put engineers on a pedestal after seeing how well the US military could manage matériel and logistics. This led to a stockpile of consumer goods. Marketers became the heroes as they created mass-consumer markets. Following the mastery of distribution, promotion and sales, accountants came to prominence. They estimated costs and counted the profit...

Our Food: Packaging & Public Health

Great expectations and hard times: developing community indicators in a healthy communities initiative in Canada.

This paper reports on expectations for and community members' experience in the development of community indicators in a healthy communities initiative (HCI) in Alberta, Canada. The HCI process involved community visioning, the creation of action plans to further the vision by addressing key health priorities and/or community capacity building activities and the development of indicators to mon...

Promoting social responsibility for health: health impact assessment and healthy public policy at the community level.

The 1997 Jakarta Declaration on Health Promotion into the 21st Century called for new responses to address the emerging threats to health. The declaration placed a high priority on promoting social responsibility for health, and it identified equity-focused health impact assessment as a high priority for action. This theme was among the foci at the 2000 Fifth Global Conference on Health Promoti...