Public Dialogue Lifestyle: Hype or Prevention Strategy?
Van Hier Naar [...] and De Nieuwe Utrechtse School organized the public dialogue:
Lifestyle: Hype or Prevention Strategy?
Tuesday, March 4, 2025, Utrecht, Inner City University Library
To stay healthy, one must have a healthy “lifestyle”—at least, that is the common belief. An unhealthy lifestyle contributes to various chronic diseases, which in turn increase pressure on society. But who is responsible for this: the individual or the collective? Should healthcare also focus on improving lifestyle? And what is the role of “industry” in the current focus on the individual?
For some physicians, lifestyle is an obvious topic in the consultation room: first improve lifestyle before turning to medication. Others consider this inappropriate: lifestyle is not a 100% free choice but is shaped by a wide range of societal and environmental factors. Emphasizing individual lifestyle implicitly places the blame for illness on the individual, which is unjustified. In other words: is lifestyle a “hype,” or is it a useful prevention strategy?
On March 4, we discussed this theme with the entire audience present and our speakers:
- Luc Hagenaars is a postdoctoral researcher in Public & Occupational Health at Amsterdam UMC. He is also an expert in the so-called “Commercial Determinants of Health”: how our health is influenced by the impact of commercial actors.
- Charlotte Hofman is a physician and PhD candidate at the Leiden University Medical Center within the “FRESHAIR4Life” project. There, she works on developing and implementing measures against air pollution and tobacco in various countries.
- Rinske van de Goor is an activist general practitioner and columnist for de Volkskrant, where she regularly writes about the theme of “lifestyle.”