TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a nonprofit organization that has been helping spread ideas since 1984. This is generally done with brief, inspiring talks that last up to 18 minutes. A wide variety of topics have been covered in dozens of languages, and public health has been touched upon a number of times.
How an Obese Town Lost a Million Pounds
Mick Cornett, the mayor of Oklahoma City, decided to put his community on a collective diet on Dec. 31, 2007, after realizing that something needed to be done after seeing his beloved city on a list of the country’s most obese cities. Concurrently, he realized that he needed to set a good example and reduce his own weight. Soon, residents started getting on board in significant numbers, resulting in more than a million pounds of weight lost over the following months and years.
Related Resource: America’s Battle with Obesity [Infographic]
Your Health Depends on Where You Live
Bill Davenhall, an expert on health and human services, is driven to spreading the word about the importance of geographical and environmental data as they relate to individuals’ health. During this talk, he talks about how his own geographical journey has affected his health, starting with spending his first two decades breathing in high amounts of carbon dioxide, methane gas and sulfur dioxide before taking in significant amounts of benzene and chloroprene for the next few decades elsewhere. Finally, he headed to the West Coast but not all the way to the coast; instead he went to a place with some of the country’s unhealthiest air. But he is never asked about that aspect of his health history when seeing a doctor.
How the “Ghost Map” Helped End a Killer Disease
Another example of geography playing a role in how long people live is described in this talk, although the specific example spoken about had a lot more of an immediate impact on those involved. In this talk, Steven Johnson describes how a cholera outbreak that hit London in 1854 was ultimately controlled thanks to research conducted by physician John Snow. He had created a detailed map that showed where afflicted people were and noticed one common characteristic among a significant number of them.
How to Live to Be 100+
This speaker, Dan Buettner, is a best-selling author who has spent a considerable part of his life researching areas of the world where people live for long periods of time and how to recreate that elsewhere. He starts his talk with an interesting statistic, that about 90 percent of what dictates how long we live is determined by our lifestyle, not our genes. He then discusses the many things that average people think of when they consider how to live longer before going into what he has found out.
The Single Biggest Health Threat Women Face
C. Noel Bairey Merz, a physician and professor who works for the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, speaks about the importance of heart disease education as it relates to women. The focus of this disease has been on men for so long while the dangers of breast cancer are concurrently much more at the forefront of the minds of women despite heart disease killing more women. She commends all of the work that has been done for breast cancer while endorsing that same effort for heart disease.
Spending time listening to these TED talks will certainly cause you to think more deeply about a lot of things that have been or soon will be important in your life. In fact, they may help you decide on a specific path to take in the public health field.
