Transcriber: Chelsea Yan Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I’m so pleased to be here today to talk about one of my favorite topics:
building resilient communities.
A key way that we can ensure we are a part of a resilient structure
is to give everyone the same level of access
to things like healthcare, education, and economic stability,
but that’s not always the reality,
and that’s why I want to share some information
on the topic of social determinants of health.
If I envision cross-breeding two flowers,
I’m taking into account the information I know about each of them:
the color of its petals, shape and size of its leaves,
and the height of its stock,
and having them reproduce with the goal -
creating offspring that have a combination of both of their traits
in the best possible way,
While genetically distinct from its parents, this new seed
is hopefully composed of the most stable and eye-catching components,
and my hope in breeding them is generating a new flower,
one that blossoms wider and stands stronger
than any of the generation preceeding it.
Once introduced to the world, all it takes
is the right environmental conditions for it to blossom and thrive.
All it needs from me is water, proper soil, and sufficient sunshine,
and over the course of time, it will flourish.
and if this flower were to stop growing or fail to bloom,
I would assess what went awry and whether or not
I had been meeting its environmental needs.
If I break a leaf or a petal falls off, I can reflect on where in my care
the flower lacked support in its journey towards blooming and beautiful stasis.
This oversimplified, abbreviated account of raising a plant
allows me to illustrate to you
the ways our bodies live within our surrounding context.
Our bodies wear the stories of the realities we are faced with,
and through time, we are adorned with more physical scars, marks, and wrinkles
to reveal where we have been.
Looking inward, we can see the same thing happening down to the cellular level.
As we continue living and growing
within our social, economic, and personal surroundings,
our micro universe is warped and changed just as much.
We have the qualities within us,
our genes and biochemistry that serve as some indication of our health,
but outside of that,
there is a constellation of social and environmental factors
that alter our path to being healthy in ways that are big and small.
The statuses, privileges, and inequities that we associate with the social world
go far deeper.
They make their way past the dermis and muscle and soak into our bones
and then some.
These factors, better known as social determinants,
encode themselves in our bodies over time,
and many of the things we see as matters of everyday life
can directly contribute to our physical well-being.
So what are the social determinants?
Social and community context, healthcare access and quality,
neighborhood and built environment, education access, and economic stability
are key domains of social determinants,
including within these domains:
maybe whether or not you live in stable and safe housing, social inclusion,
the policies that govern the way in which we work and play,
your access to healthy food,
your relationships, and the time you spend with your family.
These are the conditions we live in and lived through,
and the quality and interplay
of these factors may push you towards a healthier lifestyle.
You may wonder,
“How does my lived experience go as far as to determine my health?”
To really get a better sense,
I will point you towards an example of something happening in and around you.
Growing up, you might have primarily eaten fast food for your daily meals
or sat on a couch or in a car to eat as opposed to a dinner table.
There have been very few grocery stores around you or near you,
and if present, they may have proved unaffordable.
If your caretakers or family spent much of the day working
or suffered from debilitating illness,
the cooked meals you ate might have come directly from a can, box, or bag.
Just thinking about this, ask yourself,
“How many ways can I prepare a bowl of Maruchan Instant Lunch?”
The distance between you and the grocery store,
the gap of access to fresh, less processed, and healthier food,
is representative of the food desert
that millions of people live through yearly.
This distance also makes knowledge and components
around the importance of healthy lifestyles increasingly inaccessible.
More interconnected than that
are the other factors associated with living in a food desert -
sedentary lifestyle and increased smoking,
which low-income communities engage in at much higher rates.
Heart disease, which is a set of conditions
developed from decades of poor diet and exercise,
remains the number one killer in America and continues to surge.
Peer-reviewed study after peer-reviewed study
support the strong association between food deserts
and increased cardiovascular risk.
And it doesn’t help that our learning and working environments,
as well as social supports, especially in the age of COVID-19,
often compound pre-existing barriers to accessing a healthy lifestyle.
And so we are coming into the world, like the flowers seed,
with the intent of having all that we need to be great already within us
Our social environments, our lived experience,
and the inequities and privileges within it, however,
are beginning to sow seeds of their own, up and down our bodies’ ecosystems.
Our health can flourish or it can be doomed
to weather based on the world that we live in.
And many times we do not become aware of this fact until we confront it head on.
Yet over time, the economic status we exist in,
our proximity to illness and affliction,
and societal, cultural, and familial pressures take shape
in the social determinants of health, like the ones I just spoke about.
So what can we do if we know that something as significant
as the power distribution and the inequities
in our society directly reinforce unequal access to a healthy life?
As time powers on and we continue to be weathered and healed
and weathered again by the forces around us,
how do we educate and act to empower ourselves,
and more importantly, those people in economic groups that differ from ours?
We can turn towards community building, development, and learning,
so that we know to be better in articulating
in favor of improving our communities.
And I share this,
especially because an awareness of these systems
is a foundational step in resolving them.
To feel inspired is to have something that serves as inspiration,
and for me, the mere knowledge and lived experience
of these social determinants of health
allows me to look with clear eyes at the health of our communities
across the Unites States and the world.
And as someone who lives in Princeton,
just a few miles away up the road from here,
I know how easy it is to forget that there are people not far from this community
who may not have the same opportunities as others.
When we think of ways to build resilient communities,
we should always factor in the needs and interests of those around us
to ensure that remain equitable opportunities for everyone.