Discussion 2 WK 4
Life Course Approach – Part One
Life Course Approach – Part One Program Transcript
DR. STEPHEN BEZRUCHA: So I described a couple of determinants of health. Poorer people have poorer health. And health keeps on improving. The improvements are not shared equally.
The last ten years as I delved into this subject, there's been a key piece that was missing from trying to understand health in societies today. And that has to do with circumstances in early life. It turns out when you begin to ask the question, how important his early life for our health as adults? It's incredibly important.
About half of our health as adults is programmed. It's like software that you can't alter, read-only memory. That sometime between conception and before we go to school, roughly half of our health as adults is programmed or determined in that period.
That's a really challenging concept because in the United States, we all believe we're born equal. But, in fact, by the time you're born, so much of your health as an adult is already determined. And we can't change that. Similarly, health in the first few years of life after that is incredibly important. And so that asks the question, whose responsibility is early life? Well, typically, some societies say, "Well, we just tell the families what they should do, and they should just do those things." Whereas other societies put in place structures that make it easy to do those things. They sort of become natural.
Not only is health structured by this period from conception to before you go to school, it goes back generations. All of us started life in our maternal grandmother's womb. Our maternal grandmother was a key player in how our health began, because your mother produced the ovum when she was in your maternal grandmothers womb. That is, girls are born with all the ova, the eggs that they will ever have. So your maternal grandmother's circumstances have to affect your health. It's just logical since that's where you started your being. When that ovum is fertilized, that fertilized egg, the zygote, divides roughly 42 times to produce a newborn, and then about five further cycles of cell division from the newborn, to produce an adult.
Now think about it. Cell division is an incredibly important period that's very sensitive to many factors, physical, environmental, and social, and stress, and all these factors. And which one would you pick to influence your health as an adult; the first 42 or the next five? And that gives you a sense of the importance of those are first nine months. Many, many studies show this importance, but mostly, in this country, we don't pay much attention to that since we're all born equal.
©2014 Laureate Education, Inc. 1
Life Course Approach – Part One
Other societies look upon it differently. And that's what you'll explore in this section So many of these circumstances, you might relate to if you've had children of your own, or you reflect upon being a child growing up. They are incredibly important. And early life lasts a lifetime. And actually, given the intergenerational phenomenon that I've just discussed, really life last many lifetimes.
So societies that are healthy-- healthier-- put in place the right structures early in life so that health keep on improving and getting better because of the choices that societies make, not the choices individuals make.
Life Course Approach – Part One Additional Content Attribution
Music:
Creative Support Services Los Angeles, CA
Dimension Sound Effects Library Newnan, GA
Narrator Tracks Music Library Stevens Point, WI
Signature Music, Inc Chesterton, IN
Studio Cutz Music Library Carrollton, TX
©2014 Laureate Education, Inc. 2