During the last few decades inordinate attention has been paid to the
promotion of ‘healthy’ living. This has come from governmental, academic,
commercial and popular sources. Few people today can be unaware of the
espoused merits of such a lifestyle. Anyone who has visited a supermarket
recently, turned on the television, listened to the radio or read a magazine
must have noticed that awareness of health issues is growing. Health is clearly
a topical issue at both political and cultural levels.
At the political level from the mid-1970s, starting with Prevention and Health:
Everybody’s Business(DHSS, 1976a), there has been a dramatic increase in the
number of policy documents and statements on prevention and, since the early
1980s, health promotion (see Parish, this volume, for a review). More recently
a high profile has been given to The Health of the Nation(Department of Health,
1992a) and its attendant targets and to subsequent documents such as Working
Together for Better Health(Department of Health, 1993a). It provides an
interesting example of the ‘globalisation’ of policy and politics in that many of
these documents and statements produced in Britain have drawn upon
frameworks developed internationally by the World Health Organisation’s
Health For All(HFA) initiative. However, this said, such global initiatives may
be interpreted very disparately by different nation states, and this process of
policy mediation can tell us much about the policy and ideological priorities of
different political regimes (Gustafsson and Nettleton, 1992)