Good morning, Cadre. Happy Saturday. I'll give everyone a little bit of time to jump in, see if anyone shows up today. Hello. My name is Kristen, I'm a dietitian. And you get some environmental noise because I want to sit outside.
About 36% of our health and wellness comes from individual behaviors. Public health has to do with the structures and policies put in place that support our communities. I would just encourage everyone listening to live in that gray space that both things are incredibly important.
I think it's a fun conversation to have thinking about ways we can help our neighbors and our communities. We thrive when our communities thrive. Have a wonderful weekend. Next time, guys.
Good morning, Cadre. Happy Saturday. I hope everyone's doing well. I'll give everyone a little bit of time to jump in, see if anyone shows up today. Good morning. Good morning. Hello. Good morning. Morning, Jules. There are a couple other names in there that popped up that I haven't seen before, but welcome. If you haven't been here before. My name is Kristen, I'm a dietitian. I'm based out of Denver. And you get some environmental noise because I want to sit outside. Morning, Andy. I know that I've been doing a little bit of a GI series for the last couple of weeks and initially today I thought I was going to talk about just the microbiome, what we know, what we don't know.
But I decided I want to push that till next week because something that has been on my mind this week is the importance of differentiating between personal wellness, personal wellness and public health and why we should care about public health. There's been a lot of morning speak wonder. Yes, I'm a May baby, a Taurus if you will. There's been a lot in the news in the last couple of weeks with different policies being proposed and changed and just in the world of public health a lot of changes have occurred.
And I think it's really important to talk about why we should care about public health and the influence that that has on our own individual wellness. Because you can't really have personal wellness, individual wellness without public health. And the big difference is public health has to do with the structures and policies put in place that support our communities. It's really about. I have a really cool graphic I think I've shared before. About 36% of our health and wellness comes from individual behaviors.
And those are things like the foods that we choose to eat, the activity that we get, our sleep patterns, drug use, things like that. All the choices that we make individually on a day to day basis doesn't even make up half of what influences our health and well being. Other things that do influence our health and well being. Genetics is a big one environment. So are you living in a place that's highly polluted? Is there clean drinking water? Those things are oftentimes not within our control. Other things like access to health care and medical care, there's a lot of stigma in that realm and care varies widely.
Access to that care varies widely. All of these other pieces that are not choices that we necessarily make on a day to day basis, but have a huge impact. A motorcycle driving by. So I think it's important for me to Talk about this as a dietitian, because oftentimes in my role, when I'm counseling people one on one, we are talking about behaviors that they're implementing or not implementing. And it really is a lot of times focused on individual choice. But in reality, you're only able to make those individual choices because you have the access to healthcare, you have the access to clean drinking water.
We have all of these pieces that come from public health. And I would just really encourage everyone listening to live in that gray space that both things are incredibly important, especially when there's a lot of stuff out there that is focused on individual behavior. When someone is given slew of eat this, not that, do this activity, do this amount of activity, take these supplements, xyz, whatever it is. And they're not able to do that for whatever reason. There's a lot of shame involved. And shame doesn't help anybody.
JC has some really cool research out there on shame. If anyone's following that, he's officially published around that topic. So you should all ask him about it if you haven't already. But just something that I've been thinking about. I don't want the public health piece to get lost. There is space and there should be space for both in speaking to the world as well as in my individual practice. It's what I try to do. So just something I was thinking about and wanted to share, speak into existence.
Because it's my birthday and I can talk about whatever I want. That's all I really have for you today. Just a couple words of encouragement that we're all just doing what we can every day, and that's great. And sometimes things don't work out in our favor and that's okay too. I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your weekend. Next week, I promise I'll be back talking about gi, specifically the microbiome. So if you're interested in that, My plan is to just kind of go over the things we know and the things we don't know because there's a lot of information out there that can be kind of messy to work through.
Yeah. If you're interested, pop on back in here next week, same time, 8:30 Mountain. And I believe we have one more session later today with Dan. Thank you, Jules. Happy studies. I already. I've gotten one free coffee already and I have two more that I gotta grab and save for later. If you have any questions, if you're interested in public health at all, find me, message me. I think it's a fun conversation to have thinking about ways we can help our neighbors and our communities that, in turn, results in helping ourselves because we thrive when our communities thrive.
So I'll see you all next week. Have a wonderful weekend. And hopefully everyone else's allergies are doing okay, because mine are not. Next time, guys.
