NTNU Health and life science - Healthy lifestyles
Healthy life spans
Healthy life spans
How do we create a society with the best opportunities for a healthy life?
Within this focus area, we will look at causal factors and explore effective health promotion and prevention measures for the public health challenges with particularly large health losses: mental ill health, musculoskeletal disorders, obesity, cancer and dementia. We need to understand how the physical, mental and social environment creates disease and promotes health, and which preventive and health-promoting measures will be effective at community and individual level in Norway and the rest of the world.
Early and interdisciplinary health promotion efforts are important as health habits and lifestyle are established early in life. Sectors such as housing, kindergartens, schools, workplaces, cultural and activity facilities, infrastructure, public physical and digital spaces represent important arenas for understanding causes, but also for facilitating health promotion measures that help to influence lifestyle and healthy habits over time. Healthy lifestyles are also about what measures and technology can make people better able to cope with illness and live good lives despite ongoing or completed illness.