ODPHP Director

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans (the Guidelines) provides advice on what to eat and drink to meet nutrient needs, promote health, and prevent disease. To ensure the Guidelines continues to meet the health needs of all, we who support the development process earnestly ask for participation and feedback from those in the fields of nutrition and public health, and – just as importantly – the public at large.

Healthy People 2030, tracks 8 Overall Health and Well-Being Measures (OHMs). Each represents a global outcome measure intended to assess the trajectory toward the Healthy People 2030 vision. OHM-01, the new well-being measure, is expressed as overall life satisfaction and reflects cumulative contributions of health and non-health factors. Now that the baseline for this measure of overall well-being is established, we can begin to evolve our understanding of it, and others like it and explore their implications more fully.

Heart disease has the potential to affect all people. The persistent myth that it is primarily a “men’s disease” simply isn’t true. In fact, heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States. Yet only about half of women recognize this. Heart disease accounts for about 1 in 5 deaths among women every year as compared to 1 in 4 deaths in men. About 1 in 16 women age 20 years and older have coronary artery disease, the most common type of heart disease.

Health and Well-Being Matter is the monthly blog of the Director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. This month, RDML Paul Reed welcomes Victoria Brown, Deputy Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and her perspectives on HUD’s approach to building robust communities in the context of the recently released Federal Plan for Equitable Long-Term Recovery and Resilience. HUD’s investment in local entities and its intentional focus on promotion of what the Vital Conditions for Health and Well-Being framework calls “civic muscle” is akin to a melding of needs, interests, resources, and tools, despite presumed agency: what's come to be known as “shared stewardship”.