Making the Invisible Causes of Population Health Visible: A Public Health of Consequence, August 2018

Another way, which has equal validity, would be to suggest focusing on the behaviors that contribute to these causes of health, leading us to focus on smoking, toxic substances, the use of firearms, and obesity as the causes of death.2 Yet another approach would tackle the more foundational drivers of population health, which would focus on the contributions of low education, poverty, and spatial racial residential segregation as the causes of health and disease.3 None of these approaches are wrong-all are correct. [...]although, for example, low education sets one on a trajectory that will include a poor living environment, limited opportunities for exercise, and, subsequent, obesity, all of these ultimately manifest as cardiovascular disease, and it is cardiovascular disease that compromises health. [...]an understanding of health requires an understanding of the complex causal architecture that creates health in the first place and structured thinking about how we can grapple with these complex causes to improving health.4 One ofthe challenges we face with this reckoning, however, is that it is unusual for one discipline to engage with all of these factors; this leads to fragmented knowledge and limits our full grasp of the factors that contribute to health. [...]using data from the Behavioral and Risk Factor Surveillance Survey, Mehta et al.