In this first post, I’d like us to pause and reflect on how we understand health and what we mean when we talk about human health.
For a long time, health was understood in a simple, straightforward way.
To be healthy meant to be free from disease, injury, or illness. If nothing hurt, you were considered healthy.
This definition made sense, and it brought enormous progress. But over time, it became clear that it wasn’t enough.
From illness to wellbeing
Gradually, we began to recognise that health is not only physical. Mental health entered the conversation — an important and necessary shift. We started to talk about stress, burnout, emotional wellbeing, and the social conditions that affect how people feel and function.
This marked a real change: health was no longer just something that happens inside the body. It became something shaped by how we live, work, relate to others, and experience the world around us.
But even this expanded definition still had limits.
Looking beyond the individual
More recently, another layer has become impossible to ignore:
the health of our surroundings.
Air pollution, water quality, soil contamination, biodiversity loss, climate change, food systems — these are not “external” issues. They shape our health every day, often long before illness appears.
When the environment is degraded, human health follows.
When ecosystems are destabilised, the consequences reach our bodies, our communities, and our healthcare systems.
When we move beyond a narrow vision of health, one thing becomes clear: everything is deeply interconnected.
A broader way of understanding health — what academia says
We are not alone in sensing this. Researchers and scholars are also rethinking how health should be defined.
Below is a quote from Lefrançois and colleagues (2025). It’s complex and academic, but don’t worry — we’ll break it down together.
“A broader definition of health, based on inter-dependencies with increased citizen empowerment, would promote individual responsibility to protect others, especially the poorest, but also ecosystems. These changes will require children and future citizens to be literate about these complex and integrated approaches, through their incorporation into the school curriculum. A more comprehensive definition will also drive much-needed changes in the training of human health professionals (which currently barely includes environmental health) and promote common and better interconnected training of doctors, pharmacists, nurses, veterinarians, ecologists, and biologists.”
— Lefrançois, 2025
What this means, in simpler terms, is that health is not only personal — it is shared. Our wellbeing depends on others, and others’ wellbeing depends on us. This includes not only people, but also animals and the environments we all rely on.
Understanding these interdependencies helps us act responsibly — not out of guilt, but out of awareness.
Why this matters for the future
The quote also points to something essential: if health is truly interconnected, then the way we educate future generations — and train health professionals — needs to change.
Our health does not begin and end at the GP’s office or in a hospital. And health professionals should not be trained in isolation. Doctors, nurses, veterinarians, environmental scientists, ecologists — all work with different parts of the same reality.
It’s important that we understand this now, but it’s just as important to pass it on to future generations. Children need tools to understand complex systems — how human actions affect animals, ecosystems, and ultimately themselves.
When these perspectives remain separated, we miss the bigger picture. And when we miss the bigger picture, we miss opportunities to protect our own health.
Knowledge leads to empowerment
A broader definition of health doesn’t make responsibility heavier — it makes it clearer.
Understanding how environment, society, and biology interact empowers people to ask for better conditions: cleaner air, safer food, healthier cities, fairer systems. Health shifts from something we passively receive to something we actively shape together.
This isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about learning to ask better questions — and about looking beyond the individual body when we talk about health. Knowledge brings awareness, and awareness leads to empowerment. When we understand what health truly includes, we can discuss it, protect it, and demand justice for everyone.
In future posts, we’ll continue unpacking these ideas and making them more accessible. For now, this is an invitation to pause and reflect.
What does being healthy really mean to you — and who, or what, does it include?
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
Source:
Lefrançois, T. et al. (2025) ‘A new definition of human health is needed to better implement One Health’, The Lancet, 406(10504), pp. 672–675. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(25)01015-3.
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